After Patriarch Jun Wenzhe left, the room felt strangely empty.
The manual was gone from the table. The door had closed. The words his father had left behind lingered longer than the incense ever could. Jun Jie stood where he was for a while, one hand braced against the edge of the basin, the bruises from Qin Zhen's fists waking up again now that the heat of victory had cooled.
Outside, the sect had begun to quiet down.
It would not stay quiet for long. By tomorrow, half the inner court would be pretending they had always believed in him. The other half would be trying to decide whether his change was a miracle, a secret inheritance, madness, or a threat.
Jun Jie preferred threat.
He changed into a loose inner robe, opened the window wider, and sat cross-legged on the bed. Night air drifted through the room carrying the smell of wet stone, old wood, and distant training fields. His body ached in deep places, but the ache felt clean. It belonged to effort. He could respect that.
He closed his eyes and began circulating the Iron Blood Tyrant Body Art.
Breath lowered. Blood moved with a steadier pulse than before. The body he had inherited had finally stopped feeling like borrowed flesh. It was his now, every bruise and breakthrough of it.
For a while, he said nothing.
Nya let him have the quiet longer than usual. That alone was suspicious.
Jun Jie opened one eye. "You're being unusually civilized."
A pale blue panel appeared above the bed.
[I am observing your condition.]
A few more circulations passed before he spoke.
"How big is this world?"
The panel hovered without answering at once.
[That is a broad question.]
"I asked broadly on purpose."
[Because precision has failed you before?]
Jun Jie's mouth moved. "Because I don't intend to spend my second life staring at the walls of one sect and calling that ambition."
His breathing stayed even, but his attention sharpened.
"I beat Qin Zhen," he said. "Good Satisfying too. But if I stop there, I'm just another idiot who thought one victory meant the sky had run out."
The panel brightened slightly.
[That answer was less embarrassing than expected.]
"Tell me."
The room stayed quiet for a breath, and when Nya spoke again, the usual teasing remained in her voice, though it sat farther back now.
[You are currently in the Lower Domain.]
Jun Jie opened his eyes fully.
[In simple language, this is the part of the Mortal Realm where regional sects bite each other over resources, pride, old grudges, marriage alliances, beast territories, and ruins they rarely understand.]
"Comforting."
[You live in a body sect that is known in this region, feared by weaker neighbors, disrespected by stronger ones, and one bad decade away from becoming a cautionary tale.]
Jun Jie nodded once. That sounded right.
[Above the Lower Domain sits the Middle Domain.]
[That is where local talent stops being impressive.]
[The sects are older, richer, crueler, and much harder to bluff. Geniuses exist there in numbers large enough to offend hardworking people.]
Jun Jie rested his forearms over his knees. "And above that."
[Upper Domain.]
This time the words appeared with the answer.
[Holy lands.]
[Ancient clans.]
[The kind of ruins that destroy dynasties.]
[The kind of treasures that make entire regions bleed.]
[That is where the thirteen great treasures of this world stop sounding like stories and start sounding like reasons for war.]
The Heaven-Severing Relic Blade sat somewhere behind his thoughts like a sealed wound. His inheritance. His sect's greatest treasure. A promise, more than a weapon, at least for now.
"And that's just the first world."
[Correct.]
Nya's tone changed there.
The light of the panel steadied. The teasing thinned. What remained carried more weight than before, enough to draw him upright without realizing it.
[This is the Mortal Realm.]
[Not the world.]
[The realm.]
Jun Jie went still.
[There is another above it.]
[The Immortal Realm.]
Jun Jie let the idea settle through him like cold water. "How many people here even know that exists?"
[The strong.]
[The old.]
[The frightened.]
[The ambitious.]
[And anyone about to die from ignorance at a sufficiently high altitude.]
That one sounded more like her again, but not by much.
He kept his attention on the panel. "Tell me properly."
A larger window unfolded above him, pale blue against the dark room.
[Mortal Realm]
[Body Tempering]
[Qi Gathering]
[Foundation Establishment]
[Core Formation]
[Nascent Soul]
[Spirit Severing]
[Void Refining]
[Dao Seed]
[Heaven Ascension]
[Mortal Transcendence]
Below it, a second ladder appeared.
[Immortal Realm]
[True Immortal]
[Earth Immortal]
[Heaven Immortal]
[Golden Immortal]
[Dao Immortal]
[Immortal King]
[Immortal Emperor]
[Celestial Sovereign]
[Dao Sovereign]
[Supreme Origin Being]
Jun Jie read the names slowly.
At Body Tempering, the first ladder had already looked long.
Beside the second, his current strength felt microscopic.
"I beat one disciple," he said quietly.
[Yes.]
"I haven't even begun."
[No.]
[You have begun.]
[That is different.]
The answer sat better than comfort would have.
Jun Jie kept reading the names. "What changes in the Immortal Realm?"
[Scale.]
[Meaning.]
[Cost.]
That was not enough. They both knew it. Nya seemed to accept that and continued.
[In the Mortal Realm, sects fight over spirit stones, beasts, inheritance grounds, bloodlines, and territory.]
[In the Immortal Realm, factions fight over laws.]
[They fight over destiny, authority, lineage, world fragments, immortal resources, and paths of dao that can shape entire heavens.]
Jun Jie's fingers pressed lightly against his knee.
"And the market reaches there too."
[The Infinite Myriad Worlds Market reaches farther than that.]
He lifted his head. "Farther than the Immortal Realm?"
[Far enough that your current poverty remains offensive across multiple cosmological standards.]
Jun Jie leaned back slightly. "Why did anyone buy that smut novel for fifty thousand, anyway? If the market is that vast, why would a piece of trash from my room mean anything to people living in realms above this one?"
[Because value is not local.]
The answer came clean and quick.
[A thing may be vulgar here and exotic elsewhere.]
[A technique dismissed in one region may complete a broken path in another.]
[A flower growing by a ditch can be worthless to ten thousand people and priceless to the one person whose poison only that flower can cure.]
[Markets do not worship dignity, Host.]
[They worship desire.]
He let that line sit in the air.
That, more than anything, sounded true.
Jun Jie lowered his head slightly, thinking through it. A ruined sect in the Lower Domain. A body art perfected in secret. A market that let him sell filth to strangers and buy power with the profit. Above that, whole domains. Above those, the Mortal Realm. Above the Mortal Realm, the Immortal Realm. Above even that...
His voice came quieter.
"And Supreme Origin Being?"
The room seemed to draw inward.
Nya did not answer right away.
When she did, even the pale blue of the panel looked colder.
[That is a level where names begin to weigh more than bloodlines.]
[Where civilizations end because someone higher on the ladder found them inconvenient.]
[Where laws can be worn like robes.]
[Where entities stop chasing immortality and begin deciding what immortality means.]
He let out a slow breath and leaned back slightly on the bed.
"Then what would you recommend I do now?"
This time Nya answered without that cold distance from before. Her usual bite returned, bright and immediate.
[Stop being the little piece of trash you currently are.]
Jun Jie's mouth twitched.
"How motivating."
[You have me.]
[Use me.]
Jun Jie lowered his head, thinking through the rooms above him, the worlds beyond this one, the paths he had not even started to touch yet. The sect no longer felt like the whole map. It felt like the first stone beneath his foot.
Nya pulsed once and added, almost lazily:
[I also think you should consider writing a sequel to the novel you sold.]
That dragged a short laugh out of him before he could stop it.
"A sequel."
[The market responded well.]
[Degenerates reward consistency.]
Jun Jie rubbed a thumb against his knuckles and looked out through the open window into the night beyond the sect.
A bigger world. A higher sky. An immortal realm above the mortal one. A market stretching farther than he could even picture yet.
And apparently, somewhere along that road, more smut.
His smile turned faint and crooked.
'Fine.'
'If that's where the first money came from, I'll squeeze it dry before I move on to bigger things.'
The panel hovered before him, pleased enough with itself to be annoying again.
[Now you're thinking properly.]
Jun Jie closed his eyes and let the Iron Blood Tyrant Body Art move through him once more, quieter now, his thoughts no longer trapped inside one sect, one duel, or one week's worth of desperation.
The road in front of him had just become much larger.