The Primordial Divine Domain Myriad Dharma Dominion Origin Nine Heavens Hundred Bones Royal Court came apart.
The red-gold firmament fell in sheets, like colored glass leached of its dye. The spirit veins went dark in sequence, from the Secret Realm's rim inward toward the center, and when the white light finally dispersed, all that remained of that once-sovereign territory was a field of wreckage.
White and gold fused into one in the depths of his Sea of Consciousness, and in that same instant her voice came back.
[Hundred Bones Resonance: Heavenly Emperor Gu, I'm back.]
Gu Chengming closed his eyes for a moment, and smiled.
Welcome back, Hundred Emperor.
Of course, before celebrating the fact that the Hundred Emperor had finally admitted what was in her heart, there was one more piece of business that required attention.
The score with the Red Dust Immortal needed settling too.
As for how the Red Dust Immortal had spent these last few days, it's worth rewinding a little.
Several days ago, the Red Dust Immortal had used karmic teleportation to appear in front of Gu Chengming, intending to stage a tidy little drama titled "Sixth Realm Senior Outwits Third Realm Junior."
The moment he stepped through, he saw the white-haired woman standing behind the junior in question. What happened after that, we all know.
The Red Dust Immortal executed a crash landing at record speed, and without ever getting the chance to trade a single blow, was awarded the honorary title of jailbird.
From his point of view, naturally, all of this was entirely reasonable.
After all, if Gu Chengming and that white-haired monster truly were working together — if the two of them had laid a colossal trap spanning timelines to lure him into invoking the Returning River, so that the fracture in the Heavenly Dao's conservation could be used to call the white-haired monster out of causality itself — then the whole board really would have collapsed for good.
Honestly, the number of things in this world capable of frightening the Red Dust Immortal could be counted on one hand. But that day, he had genuinely been afraid.
Still, the Red Dust Immortal was nobody's easy mark.
Fleeing was fleeing, fear was fear. He had not survived all these centuries by out-fighting anyone. He had survived by getting away, seeing clearly, and being willing to wait.
So beginning the very next day, he hid himself, and through the surviving karmic threads he watched the Secret Realm's movements with great care.
And after those days of observation, his read on the situation shifted in some subtle ways.
Gu Chengming and the entity calling itself Heavenly Emperor were, in all likelihood, not allies. And the relationship between the white-haired woman at Gu Chengming's side and the white-haired monster of the Royal Court was, to put it mildly, peculiar.
Their auras overlapped almost perfectly, like two faces of a single being — and yet they were unmistakably two separate individuals.
That was what began to make him doubt his own conclusions.
What if everything he had guessed before was wrong? What if there was no "ancient Heavenly Emperor descending into the mortal world by way of the Returning River" at all? What if this entire mess was simply an accident, a variable the Returning River had spawned by chance?
Then what, exactly, could he still do?
The entity calling itself Heavenly Emperor was troublesome, yes — but her attention was almost entirely fixed on the single task of finding Gu Chengming.
Which meant her grip on the Secret Realm was coarse. At the very least, she had never found the thing he'd left behind in it.
That had been his final arrangement before he fled. At the time he'd thought of it as an idle stone laid on the board, nothing more than the old habit of never leaving without one more card face-down.
But looking back on it now, that idle stone might well be the single most decisive move on the entire board.
The karmic parasite seed's trigger condition was a transfer of control over the Secret Realm.
The white-haired monster held the Secret Realm in an iron grip, so the parasite seed had stayed dormant.
His original plan had been to find an opening and briefly sever the link between that monster and the realm.
The odds of failure were enormous and the difficulty extreme. He had spent a long while scheming it out, and had even prepared a fallback: if it failed, he would invoke the Returning River again in whatever window existed while the white-haired monster had not yet taken full control.
And then — who could have guessed — the enemy started fighting among themselves?
He watched that Wenjian Sect elder lead nearly a hundred cultivators against the Royal Court's defensive line from three directions at once, pinning the projection army so thoroughly it couldn't cover its own head and tail.
He watched the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign's sword scars briefly cut the link between the projections and the spirit veins.
And then he watched Gu Chengming and the white-haired woman punch through blockade after blockade and drive straight into the Royal Court's heart.
Two white-haired figures facing off. One above the imperial throne, one below it.
The battle that followed left the Red Dust Immortal thoroughly bewildered.
The monster on the throne was still absurdly, unreasonably strong, and the white-haired woman below it didn't have a fraction of that power.
Under normal circumstances, a duel with a gap that wide doesn't last long.
But the strange part was that the monster on the throne, in the middle of fighting, started to talk.
"You can't do anything. You can't even hold on to your own body."
"All you can do is stand in front of him with your arms spread and protect nothing at all."
"Is this everything you have to give him?"
The Red Dust Immortal: "…?"
Honestly, those were not the sort of lines that belonged in a setting like this.
Which was why it took him half the fight to work it out.
What the two of them were actually saying was: I like you, and you like me.
One sentence. That was all. And somehow it had spawned this entire catastrophe.
Sitting there in the dark, the Red Dust Immortal's face traveled from blank to stunned to silent to something almost like relief.
Every fear of the past days, every chain of deduction, every earth-shaking theory about an "ancient Heavenly Emperor borrowing a corpse to return to life" — all of it collapsed in that moment.
There was no conspiracy spanning timelines. There were no divine machinations played out with causality as a chessboard.
From beginning to end, this was a romantic comedy set in the cultivation world.
That white-haired monster had seized an entire Secret Realm, founded a Royal Court, issued edicts, waged war in every direction and turned heaven and earth upside down — all so that another version of herself would say "I like you" to one man.
Frankly, for a while the Red Dust Immortal suspected that Gu Chengming and that white-haired Heavenly Emperor were putting on a performance purely to bait him out.
But there were a hundred ways to bait a man out, and they had chosen this absurd script.
It felt, to the Red Dust Immortal, like a personal provocation.
He watched the white-haired woman, wounded everywhere, swaying on her feet, plant herself in front of Gu Chengming.
Then she said something. He couldn't hear it. But he saw the result.
The monster on the throne stopped attacking.
A white radiance surged out from within the woman below — light of an utterly pure quality, containing no spiritual power, no causality, no force attribute that fit anywhere in the Red Dust Immortal's system of understanding.
Then the white light condensed into a fist, and slammed into the monster on the throne.
The red-gold firmament came apart with it. The Royal Court's spirit veins went out one by one, and in that instant control of the entire Secret Realm reverted to ownerless.
The Red Dust Immortal's pupils shrank to points. His body reacted a step ahead of his mind.
Whether or not this was all an elaborate lure meant to draw him out, the situation in front of him was, without question, the best opportunity he was ever going to get.
In a sense, it was exactly the thing he had been waiting for.
At the bottom of the Secret Realm, the karmic parasite seed that had slept for days on end bloomed the instant control changed hands.
The vast power released as the white-haired monster dispersed — all that red-gold spirit vein energy, all that terrible pressure capable of suppressing an entire realm — poured in like floodwater finding a gully, and the seed drank it, devoured it, transformed it in a frenzy.
Under that infusion, the Dharma-Station core of the Inverted Cause Lotus repaired itself at breathtaking speed.
A karmic network once riddled with holes rewove itself; broken filaments joined end to end, one after another. The reversing force of the Returning River gathered slowly in the depths of the Dharma-Station — trickles into streams, streams into rivers.
The Red Dust Immortal closed his eyes, felt the transformation of the Dharma-Station within him, and finally could not hold back a laugh.
All right. You've had your show. It's my turn now.
Fragments of the red-gold firmament were still drifting down. Gu Chengming stood at the center of the Royal Court's ruined heart, feeling the warmth of Hundred Bones Resonance and Love's Hundred Bones Resonance merging again in the depths of his Sea of Consciousness.
White light and red-gold light wound and turned around each other and finally became one, and in that moment the Secret Realm's mastery changed hands completely.
Without spirit veins to sustain it, the space began to destabilize. The projections in every direction dispersed like a receding tide, the motes of light they became hanging in the void for a single breath — as if taking one last look back — before scattering like ash.
The wind stopped. The whole realm fell into stillness, as though every sound between heaven and earth had been pressed silent under a finger.
And then —
From the very bottom of the Secret Realm came an extremely faint pulse.
There it is, Gu Chengming thought.
The parasite seed.
In the instant control transferred, the causal weaving buried at the deepest layer of the spirit veins — fused with the realm's own substrate — was waking up.
The hollows left behind by the extinguished red-gold veins made a perfect seedbed for it to spread through. Those dormant karmic filaments were like root hairs called up by spring rain, climbing and drinking and swelling along the corpses of the veins.
A rift in space opened directly above the Royal Court's ruins.
This time there was no glow of karmic teleportation, no lingering resonance of a Dharma-Station.
The Red Dust Immortal simply walked out of it, a little dust on his moon-white brocade robe, folding fan resting on one shoulder, half open and half closed.
He stood in midair and looked down at the utterly unrecognizable heart of the Royal Court beneath him — his gaze sweeping over the shattered wreck of the throne, over the fading spirit patterns, and finally settling on Gu Chengming, standing dead center in the rubble.
Gu Chengming was looking back at him. Dozens of yards of empty air stretched between them.
Last time they met, the Red Dust Immortal had bolted the instant he laid eyes on the Hundred Bones Resonance.
This time was different. The immense energy left by the collapse of the Royal Court's spirit veins was streaming without pause along pre-laid karmic channels into his Dharma-Station.
The Inverted Cause Lotus was repairing itself.
The Red Dust Immortal folded his fan closed and tucked it into his sleeve.
"You won that round," he said, his voice flat, the way a man appraises a chess game already turned over. "You used the variable the Returning River spawned to take the realm back, forced me to sever my karmic escape route, then beat her with your own hands and reclaimed control."
He gave a short laugh. "An elegant way to lure the tiger into the trap."
Gu Chengming's expression, hearing all this, became rather complicated.
— So what exactly do you think happened?
But he didn't argue. Because at the very moment the Red Dust Immortal appeared, the Son Coin that had been lying quietly on his system panel started flashing violently.
[Son Coin: Inverted Cause Lotus (Completed)]
At the same time, Gu Chengming felt it. Something out there was being restored.
The Red Dust Immortal stood before him at his ease not because he was confident of winning a straight fight, but because all he had to do was stall until the Inverted Cause Lotus finished repairing itself.
Once the Returning River fired again, everything reset to zero.
And this time he would not make the same mistake.
Gu Chengming drew a slow, deep breath.
He knew what the Red Dust Immortal was waiting for.
The Red Dust Immortal did not attack immediately.
He simply stood there, fan in his sleeve, hands clasped behind his back, posture unhurried, like a man taking a stroll through a garden.
But his eyes never left Gu Chengming.
More precisely, he was assessing.
Assessing how much that battle had drained out of him. Assessing how much of that fused white and red-gold power was left. Assessing what cards a Third Realm cultivator could possibly still be holding after a fight that brutal.
"You'll have noticed by now," the Red Dust Immortal said, neither hurried nor slow. "The thing beneath your feet. I left it there."
The candor was surprising — and not surprising at all.
Because in his eyes, the outcome was already fixed.
Gu Chengming had won the battle for the Royal Court, and it was precisely by winning that he had triggered the parasite seed's activation condition with his own hands. That had always been the back half of the plan.
Whether the Royal Court was destroyed from outside or crumbled from within, so long as control changed hands, the seed woke. It was a stone Gu Chengming would step on no matter how he played.
The Red Dust Immortal slowly raised a hand, palm turned upward.
A phantom lotus surfaced from his palm.
The Inverted Cause Lotus.
Petals hanging downward, stamen pointing at the ground — a lotus that seemed to grow from the vault of heaven with its roots driven into the void.
It wasn't fully repaired. A few gaps still marred the petal edges, leaking faint fractured light. But it was enough.
Enough for one more Returning River.
"This time —" the Red Dust Immortal's voice dropped a shade, "— I won't repeat the same mistake."
Causal force welled out of him and spread in every direction like a tide.
The sky changed color. The void trembled.
The omens of the Returning River had already begun. Within a hundred yards of him the flow of time was fraying: dust nearby hung suspended and refused to fall, while broken stone farther off drifted slowly upward, as if causality had scrambled the very direction of gravity.
If the Returning River succeeded, everything that had happened on this timeline would be overwritten.
The Hundred Bones Resonance taking physical form. The rise and fall of the Royal Court. The blossoming of Infinite Love. Those three words, I love you —
— all of it would be ground to powder beneath the petals of the Inverted Cause Lotus, and this stretch of karma with it, erased from the world forever.
But at that same moment Gu Chengming moved as well. He raised a hand, palm turned upward.
The exact same posture as the Red Dust Immortal.
And then a phantom lotus surfaced from his palm.
— The Inverted Cause Lotus.
Petals hanging downward, stamen pointing at the ground, its patterning almost perfectly symmetrical to the one in the Red Dust Immortal's hand, like a reflection thrown back by still water.
The Red Dust Immortal's pupils contracted. His hand froze in midair.
The lotus gathering the Returning River's power went into violent resonance the instant a power of identical origin appeared, and the process stalled.
"You —"
For once, there was fear in the Red Dust Immortal's voice.
He stared at the lotus in Gu Chengming's palm. That was no projection any low-tier trick could counterfeit. That was genuine Inverted Cause Lotus Dharma-Station authority.
"Why do you have the authority of the Inverted Cause Lotus?!"
— I have you to thank for that, actually.
Gu Chengming laughed to himself and said nothing.
The Red Dust Immortal's face went ugly. In his mind, the conspiracy theory he had already committed to was busily confirming itself, detail by detail.
Last time, the karmic teleportation. He had deliberately shown himself before Gu Chengming, then fled in a panic.
He'd thought he had escaped by luck. But had he?
No — that was exactly what the other side had needed!
Karmic teleportation was built on a causal connection between two people, and the establishment of such a connection was necessarily two-way.
He had ridden that causality to arrive in front of Gu Chengming — and in doing so had laid the information of his own Inverted Cause Lotus Dharma-Station bare within the other's perception.
That karmic thread had not merely been his escape route. It had been the other side's channel for stealing Dharma-Station authority!
He had severed the thread with his own hand, true. But before he cut it, the other side had already run along that line and skimmed off a strand of the Inverted Cause Lotus's origin.
So from the instant of the karmic teleportation, he had already lost?
From the moment on the previous timeline when he was forced to invoke the Returning River — earlier, even, from the moment he first took notice of Gu Chengming — everything had already been on that "Heavenly Emperor's" chessboard.
"Fine. A fine Heavenly Emperor indeed."
Honestly, the Red Dust Immortal was afraid by now. But there was no question that this had reached the stage where a man stakes everything.
His authority over the Inverted Cause Lotus had been interfered with, yes — but the effect, in the end, was only short-term.
"If this is a chess game —"
The Red Dust Immortal bit through his tongue and let a bead of blood fall onto the lotus in his palm.
The petals flared open. The gaps filled in with heart's blood, the fractured light faded, and in that instant the lotus was whole again.
"— then let's see whose cards run out first!"
Causal force erupted out of him again. The Returning River's convergence was still suppressed by the interference, but it forced itself forward anyway, violently, by burning his own origin.
The Son Coin lotus in Gu Chengming's palm began to crack under the brute-force impact, its glow guttering.
The Returning River activated in the middle of that struggle — and because the resonance of two Inverted Cause Lotuses produced interference, its causal aim skewed.
It did not rewind to this morning. It did not rewind to the day Gu Chengming set foot in Floating Isle City. It fell in a far deeper direction.
It fell to the moment of its own birth.
The world spun.
Gu Chengming's consciousness was dragged into a countercurrent far more savage than the last Returning River.
Everything in his field of vision reeled backward at tremendous speed —
— rubble reassembling, spirit veins reigniting, the red-gold firmament knitting itself back together out of falling shards, the projection army flowing backward to their posts. Then the Royal Court itself began to unmake: the red-gold spirit patterns receding from the ground, contracting toward the center like an ebbing tide, the throne of white bone flying apart, the high platform sinking back into the earth.
Faster and faster.
So fast the images stopped being images at all and became streaks of afterlight.
He saw the Red Dust Immortal appear and vanish for the first time. He saw a figure in moon-white brocade crush a spirit artifact at the opening ceremony. He saw the lamps of Floating Isle City recede from splendor into silence. He saw a floating city descend out of a sea of clouds.
And then even Floating Isle City was gone.
The cloud sea withdrew. The ocean withdrew. The land withdrew.
All that remained before him was chaos.
And within the chaos, an immortal mountain surfacing out of nothingness.
The moment the mountain appeared, Gu Chengming knew he was no longer on any timeline belonging to the present world.
The mountain lay stretched across a blue-green sea, wreathed in mist, and above its gate several great characters caught the sunlight and entered his sight.
— The Land of Nowhere.
The scene kept flowing.
Gu Chengming's consciousness was a leaf floating on the river of time, wrapped up in the current and carried helplessly forward. He saw the Land of Nowhere at its height.
It was a branch lineage of an immortal sect on a scale far beyond anything he'd imagined.
In the training grounds beneath the pagoda, disciples were practicing a sword art he had never seen — and yet somehow knew.
Sword intent like drifting cloud, sword momentum like a moon traced upstream.
The Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art?!
Surprise flickered through Gu Chengming.
The images pressed on. Disciples of the Land of Nowhere came and went, and the years slipped past like a white colt glimpsed through a crack in a wall.
Then Gu Chengming saw a person.
On the topmost floor of the Octagonal Exquisite Pagoda, a woman stood at the railing.
She wore moon-white Daoist robes, her long hair unbound and lifting in the wind, her face cool and remote. In her eyes and brows was a kind of detachment from the world, as if all the rise and ruin and honor and disgrace of creation were nothing more than clouds passing across her sight.
— The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign.
The name rose up out of the depths of time. No one had to tell it to him; it simply settled into his understanding as naturally as breathing.
And then the scene went dark.
The blue-green sea churned, black clouds bore down, and above the Land of Nowhere something seemed to seep in through a seam in heaven and earth, stirring a once-clear world into muddy water.
The Eternal Life Sect had come.
Gu Chengming couldn't make out the details of the battle. Those images had been shredded by time's turbulence into disconnected frames, one afterimage at a time.
He saw the formations of the Land of Nowhere broken one after another. He saw disciples fall in the chaos. He saw the silver light-patterns on the Octagonal Exquisite Pagoda begin to flicker wildly, like a star guttering out.
And at that node, the fragments of time suddenly sharpened.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign stood atop the octagonal pagoda. The Red Dust Immortal stood at its base. The space between them had already been utterly destroyed — no ground, no sky, only a chaotic domain woven out of time-shards and karmic filaments.
Each of them pushed the Dao they had mastered to its absolute limit in that fight.
The Red Dust Immortal's Free and Easy Wandering took causality itself as a boat, riding the connections that bind all things.
Everything in this world has causes and effects. There is causality between a falling leaf and an autumn wind, between a grain of sand and a mountain, between a stray thought and a war.
He could travel freely along those threads, like a fish through water, like a bird riding wind.
So thoroughly that all it took was for someone to speak his true name — even in a murmur — and he could project his consciousness along that newborn thread of causality and descend in the flesh.
The world called it Free and Easy Wandering, because there is nowhere between heaven and earth that causality does not reach, and nowhere within causality he could not arrive.
What the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign walked was the Dao of Time.
Time cannot be touched, cannot be observed, cannot be reversed. It is the graduation on which the world turns, the vessel in which all things are born and die, the bedrock law that even the Heavenly Dao must obey.
A cultivator who commands the Dao of Time is not fighting an enemy. She is contesting, simultaneously, with everything that has happened and everything that is about to.
And in that world-breaking battle, their two Daos collided in the deadliest way possible.
Causality twisted the course of time. Time ground the channels of causality to dust.
Whenever the Red Dust Immortal tried to anchor the Sovereign's position with causal force, she used the power of time to erase herself from that instant, leaving behind a hollow afterimage.
And whenever the Sovereign tried to use time to roll the battle back to a node favorable to herself, the Red Dust Immortal rode that rewinding karmic thread upstream and laid a killing move at the new node first.
Time and causality tangled in their clash into a knot that could not be undone.
The knot pulled tighter and tighter, until at last it had swallowed the whole of the Land of Nowhere.
The blue-green sea ran dry. The immortal mountain collapsed.
In the turbulence, the Octagonal Exquisite Pagoda was by turns brand new and rotten with age. The left half of a single beam was decayed wood from a thousand years hence; the right half was fresh timber from a thousand years past. Space itself had been torn into countless overlapping slices of time.
The turbulence of causality was stranger still. The flowers and grasses at the pagoda's foot ran a full cycle within a single breath — sown, sprouting, blooming, withering, rotting, returning to soil, sown again — then in the next breath reversed all of it, back to a single seed, and grew off in some completely different direction.
Causality broke. Time broke.
And the Land of Nowhere, in a clash beyond mortal imagining, was warped into an alien country where neither time nor causality obeyed ordinary order any longer.
— This was where the Secret Realm had come from.
Not some ancient ruin naturally sealed away by the ages, but a whole and living world that two heaven-reaching cultivators had churned into wreckage in a fight to the death.
Standing in the flood of time-shards, Gu Chengming watched the final scene of that battle with his own eyes.
The Red Dust Immortal won by half a move.
The gap of that half move was so small as to be almost nothing.
But that half move decided everything. The Sovereign's sword went a hair's breadth wide. It did not sever the Red Dust Immortal's causal foundation outright — only crippled it.
And the Red Dust Immortal's Inverted Cause Lotus struck the Sovereign dead-on. Her figure began to reverse under its power —
— not killed, but rewound. Her very existence was being pushed frame by frame by causal force, from now toward the past, and from the past toward a past more distant still.
Unchecked, she would eventually be pushed back to the point where she had not yet been born.
— Which is to say, erased from this world entirely.
But in the moment before she was gone, the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign peeled this Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art loose from the flood of time.
The sword art came free of her body, free of this realm's timeline, and became a lingering remnant like a lone wandering soul, drifting through the ruins of the fallen Land of Nowhere for who knew how many ages.
As for the Sovereign herself, she faded slowly away beneath the lotus's reversal.
At the last she looked once more at the Land of Nowhere she had guarded her whole life.
The mountain was ruined. The sea was dry. Her disciples' figures had already dissolved into the long river of time.
By the last light of her Dao of Time, she saw what would become of the sword art she had cast loose — how it would wander through the long centuries.
Picked up. Misunderstood. Forced out of a law-cultivator's technique into a sword art. Inherited at last by a broken, resentful thing with a warped temperament.
She saw that it would meet someone.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's figure became one last thread of silver light, and sank into the wreckage of the collapsing Octagonal Exquisite Pagoda.
And the Red Dust Immortal won.
But not easily.
That final sword of hers had gone wide by a hair, yet it had still gutted his causal foundation. Most of the Inverted Cause Lotus Dharma-Station's petals were shattered, and the core capability of Free and Easy Wandering had been eaten to pieces by the power of time.
More fatal still: this realm he had churned into ruins was now a cage in which time and causality were both entirely without order.
Time's turbulence made it impossible for him to judge when "now" was. Causality's disorder made it impossible for him to find any link at all to the outside world.
He was trapped there — trapped inside the world he had destroyed with his own hands.
A cornered beast still fights.
In the earliest years, he tried to repair the Inverted Cause Lotus and then use causal force to open a channel to the outside.
He failed.
Causality here was scrambled. Every thread he wove was torn apart by the turbulence of time.
So he changed approach. If causality was a dead end, then he would come at it from time.
He began studying the residue of the Sovereign's temporal domain.
Day after day. Year after year.
From a pure cultivator of the Dao of Causality, he was forced to step into the domain of time.
The Dao of Time is boundless, but with his talent and accumulation he did, slowly, comprehend a sliver of its surface —
— enough, at least, to understand the operating rules of the temporal turbulence inside this realm.
So he devised a new plan.
Go upstream against time, and have his followers of that era call out his true name before the war ever broke out. So long as someone spoke that name, he could use what remained of Free and Easy Wandering to slip back along that thread of causality into the past.
And then rewrite everything.
That plan failed as well. Across a span of time that vast, the precision of causality simply could not be guaranteed.
The Red Dust Immortal sat in those ruins for he didn't know how long — long enough that he began to wonder whether the concept of "time" retained any meaning at all for a man trapped in turbulence.
Until one day —
A group of cultivators blundered in.
Young, weak, entirely ignorant of what this place was, they took it for an ordinary ancient ruin and came bounding in to hunt treasure, to temper themselves, to spar.
The Red Dust Immortal woke from his stillness, watched those ant-small figures move through his cage, and a new idea rose in him.
— Carry my true name out.
Let someone qualified speak his name in the outside world.
So long as there was one stable karmic thread out there to anchor to, Free and Easy Wandering could pull him free.
Then he could recuperate outside, repair his Dharma-Station, and finally ride the long river of time upstream to rewrite the ending of that battle.
But how rare was a person capable of speaking his true name and bearing his causality?
Batch after batch of cultivators came and went. Not one was fit.
Until Gu Chengming stepped into the Secret Realm.
The images cut off there.
The rest of the story, Gu Chengming already knew.
On the first timeline, he had seen through the Red Dust Immortal's intent and moved to seal the realm entirely, cutting off every possibility of escape.
The Red Dust Immortal, refusing to accept defeat, had used the Inverted Cause Lotus to invoke the Returning River.
On the second timeline, the Hundred Bones Resonance took physical form, the Royal Court was founded, and everything went to hell.
And now —
The Returning River had gone out of control in the resonance of two Inverted Cause Lotuses, and swept them both back to this, the very beginning.
The wellspring of all causality. The place where the story started.
Gu Chengming's consciousness tore free of the flood of time-shards.
He opened his eyes. The scattering afterimages of history were gone.
He stood in a vast expanse of void. Beneath his feet was fractured land — or rather, countless different timelines' lands laid one atop another.
— Bluestone paving from a thousand years ago on the left, scorched earth from a thousand years hence on the right, and sandwiched between them a stretch of transparent crystal that belonged to no era he knew of at all.
There was no sky overhead.
Only a vault woven from karmic filaments and time-shards, like an enormous spiderweb, every strand of it running with light either silver or gold — the origin forces of time and causality colliding, tangling, annihilating each other without order.
This was the lowest layer of the Secret Realm, where the turbulence of time and causality met. The core of all the chaos.
The Red Dust Immortal stood a hundred feet away.
The Returning River going out of control had clearly exceeded his expectations too.
His moon-white brocade robe was no longer immaculate; time-shards had sliced several gashes in the hem. His face was bloodless.
— Forcing a damaged Inverted Cause Lotus into motion, plus the backlash of an uncontrolled Returning River, had left him in far worse condition than before.
But the lotus in his palm was still turning.
Petals hanging down, stamen pointed at the ground. The flower swayed as though it might gutter out at any moment, yet it never went dark.
"So we've come here." The Red Dust Immortal looked around, and there was a bitterness in his tone that he himself hadn't noticed.
He had been trapped in this place too long. Long enough that the notion of a "present world" had lost all meaning to him.
"Fine." He turned his head toward Gu Chengming, and his voice went cold. "Since we've returned to the beginning, then let it end at the beginning."
He said nothing more. The Inverted Cause Lotus opened, and causal force poured out.
This time he did not try to invoke the Returning River.
Because if Gu Chengming died here, died in a chaos where neither time nor causality held any order, then every strand of karma connected to him would be devoured by the turbulence.
The Hundred Bones Resonance. The Royal Court. Infinite Love. Every variable would cease to have ever existed.
And on the other side, before Gu Chengming's eyes, the images went streaming past like a revolving lantern.
Drifting cloud and bright moon crossing each other — that was the Sovereign's Dao of Time.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign, fallen among the ruins of her own mountain gate, white robes soaked through with blood.
Beaten by half a move.
Her Dao of Time had reached perfection. Flowing Cloud Moon-Following, the years like water — her understanding of time had come near to the Dao itself.
But those two words, cloud and moon: the cloud is motion, the moon is constancy. Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing does not trace time itself. It traces the moonlight.
The cloud chases the moon, the moon mirrors the cloud, cloud and moon lean on one another and are never parted for an instant.
It should have been a Dao rooted in love.
But in that battle, the Sovereign's sword lacked the tenderness of two who lean on one another.
Her cloud could not catch the moon, because she was fighting alone.
[Hundred Bones Resonance clenched her fist: Heavenly Emperor Gu, we are not fighting alone!]
Gu Chengming didn't answer, but his hand slowly closed into a fist, and white light surfaced across the knuckles.
"Hundred Emperor. Can we do Infinite Love one more time?"
No need to ask twice.
[Hundred Bones Resonance huffed: One time? Hardly enough! This Emperor would be embarrassed to say so out loud!]
[My love for Heavenly Emperor Gu will never run out in a whole lifetime!]
Gu Chengming laughed. "I love you too."
[At those words, her voice came out of the white light, full-throated and insufferably arrogant.]
[But listen closely and the tail of it curled upward, carrying everything she had never dared admit.]
[Hundred Bones Resonance: Heavenly Emperor Gu —!!!]
[Hundred Bones Resonance: I'm coming to help you!!!]
But this time the light of Infinite Love wasn't aimed at any person.
It was aimed downward.
And at that moment the Red Dust Immortal seemed to grasp what Gu Chengming meant to do.
He felt where that light was pointed. He felt the scale of the man's ambition.
Because that fist wasn't aimed at him. It was aimed at the long river of history.
— He meant to rewrite causality.
The Red Dust Immortal, who had fully intended to finish this here and now, went cold with horror — and then heard Gu Chengming say those three words. I love you.
Obviously not to him. To some other presence entirely.
And after that, the man's momentum surged even higher.
The Red Dust Immortal's legs were shaking a little.
— Damn it all, he had never in his entire life met an opponent this deranged!
White and gold light burst across the surface of the fist.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance had not gone all out before, so that earlier punch had never been fully satisfying. And right now —
The Red Dust Immortal was standing right there.
A Dharma-Station-tier existence, holder of Free and Easy Wandering, the architect of an entire Secret Realm. This was the opponent that punch deserved — the punch that hadn't been fully thrown back there in Love's Hundred Bones Resonance —
You walked right up to the door yourself.
Gu Chengming's fist came down.
Light of fused white and red-gold pierced through history and reached that distant, already-finished past.
The Penglai Immortal Sect. Its mountain gate shattered, heaven and earth overturned.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign stood alone on the ruins, white robes stained with blood, the sword in her hand pushed to its absolute limit.
Her cloud-and-moon intent had reached its end. The cloud had nowhere left to drift, and the bright moon had no one beside it.
One person's cloud and moon can never chase each other to the end.
A light of white and red-gold came pouring in through a fissure in time from twenty-seven thousand years in the future, like a river running upstream — through the frozen ice of time, through the wreckage of the Land of Nowhere, through layer upon layer of causality and fate —
It reached that lonely dusk, and in the last instant of her battle, the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign felt that light.
She did not know where it came from, or why it had come.
But in that light she felt the one thing her sword intent had always lacked.
Even across twenty-seven thousand years. Even having never once met. Even as nothing more than an echo carried back from the future.
It told her, unmistakably —
You are not alone.
The light was reflected in the Sovereign's eyes.
And then she smiled.
The sword rose.
The Red Dust Immortal's eyes nearly split from their sockets. At the bed of the river of time, a causal node sealed away for uncounted years was being rewritten.
He hurled himself forward, the Inverted Cause Lotus Dharma-Station erupting with everything it had. He had to stop this.
He could not let the outcome of that battle be rewritten.
If it was rewritten, then all his years of struggle, scheming and waiting would amount to nothing.
No — worse than nothing. If the ending back then became mutual destruction rather than his pyrrhic victory —
Then the version of him trapped in this realm would never have existed at all.
The Red Dust Immortal would be erased from causality entirely. Nothing of him would remain.
The lotus's power slammed toward Gu Chengming, karmic threads becoming countless chains that tried to strangle the white-gold light — but the chains crumbled inch by inch the moment they brushed its edge.
"This isn't fair —!"
He was screaming now, and there was raw refusal in it.
"I was trapped here for twenty-seven thousand years! I gave up everything! I calculated every route, exhausted every possibility!"
"By what right do you — with one punch, with one 'I love you' —!"
Gu Chengming didn't answer the question.
He only drew his fist back, and threw a second one.
Unlike the first, this one didn't go down. It went forward.
Straight into the Red Dust Immortal — white-gold light carrying the roar of the long river of time, carrying the sword intent that had been made whole in the Sovereign's final moment, carrying the warmth of a white-haired girl holding on to him before she faded —
One punch.
Annihilation.
In the last breath before the fist-wind reached him, the Red Dust Immortal saw certain things.
At the bed of the river of time, that rewritten causal node —
Twenty-seven thousand years of accumulated karma — the scheming, the waiting, the struggle, the Returning River, Free and Easy Wandering — came apart piece by piece as its root was rewritten, like a tower whose foundation had been taken away, collapsing silently from the top down.
The Secret Realm went quiet.
In the ashen firmament, the fissures opened by the Inverted Cause Lotus's awakening were slowly closing.
[Her voice came from the depths of his Sea of Consciousness, breath a little thin, but still smug: Heavenly Emperor Gu, how was This Emperor's performance just now? Peerlessly dashing, wouldn't you say?]
"Absolutely. I love you to death, Hundred Emperor," Gu Chengming said, laughing.
[Steam began rising off the top of the Hundred Bones Resonance's head, and she giggled woozily: Ehehe—]
[Hundred Bones Resonance favorability: 510/Unto Death, Unwavering]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula was rather sullen.]
[The Clear-Heart Formula remarked: Looks like Little Huiyuan's lost another exclusive skill.]
Gu Chengming looked away, the corner of his mouth curving up without his meaning it to.
The Primordial Divine Domain Myriad Dharma Dominion Origin Nine Heavens Hundred Bones Royal Court. Free and Easy Wandering. The Inverted Cause Lotus. The Returning River. The Red Dust Immortal —
And that dream called the Land of Nowhere, asleep for uncounted years.
All of it ended beneath Infinite Love.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 30 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉