The Heavens: A Qing, the Yue Girl at the beginning

Beneath the crown-shaped stone palace, hundreds of feet deep, and after crossing the vertical shaft concealed by the remnants of a giant tree, Zhao Qing stepped into an extremely strange space that seemed to exist independently of the real world.

What appeared before her seemed to be just a cave where one could see all around at a glance, much like the underground training grounds that many sects had dug out, with a radius of only a few hundred feet.

The scenery in sight is also extremely simple.

There is only a black agate stone tablet, taller than a person, engraved with ancient and nearly lost Tianliang script; behind the stone tablet, there is a living spring that constantly gushes with milky white water, with the same core energy as the "Fountain of Immortality" at the foot of the mountain! As if they share the same origin.

However, the most eye-catching feature is the golden pagoda behind the spring, which is about three people tall.

Although the tower appears to have a restrained luster and is not particularly dazzling, and has no carvings, strangely enough, the entire underground cavern has no other source of light, yet its brightness is almost indistinguishable from that outside, as if it were daytime.

All the light seemed to come from this seemingly ordinary golden tower, which looked like it was made of pure gold.

The unusual simplicity of the visuals and the unusual nature of these simple elements create an indescribable yet powerful contrast.

Zhao Qing hovered in the air about several feet above the spring, slowly drifting towards the golden pagoda, letting the invisible storm be quietly triggered, turning the underground space into a boiling sea!
She looked up and saw that the space above her head seemed to have been eerily stretched many times over by some means. Countless dazzling "golden meteors" were falling wildly and rapidly from that extremely high and distant deep space, covering the sky and the earth! There was nowhere to escape!
"...Using the intangible to enter the tangible, using divine sense to penetrate the void, evolving the laws of primordial energy, twisting, stretching, and contracting countless trajectories of the flow of primordial energy in heaven and earth, and rewriting the curvature and probability waves of string 'lines' based on higher-dimensional 'points,' causing this space to change in the desired direction..."

In the blink of an eye, Zhao Qing had grasped the fundamental essence of the meaning of space and truly understood that the supreme methods of these eight realms were completely different from what most people imagined.

The Void-Piercing and Void-Shattering powers described in those ancient books are not about unleashing supreme power and using extreme energy output to shatter a piece of void, but rather about skillfully mobilizing the powerful primordial energy laws that naturally exist in that void, causing the void to collapse on its own and everything to cease to exist.

Breaking a hard gemstone would naturally require an immense amount of effort, but if the gemstone itself could be altered to become as fragile as ordinary ice, breaking it would be much simpler.

As she pondered deeply and further investigated how the powerful figures of the past had constructed this unique world, the inscriptions on the black stele seemed to float up one by one!
The entire stone tablet was entwined with flying, floating inscriptions, emanating an increasingly terrifying killing intent!
Immediately afterwards, the inscriptions swirled and danced, instantly transforming into a black vortex that devoured everything!

The spring that was radiating milky white spiritual energy suddenly turned pitch black the moment the killing intent surged!

The once vibrant and ethereal spiritual energy turned into a deep and cold aura, as if it had transformed into a bottomless black maw leading to the underworld, exuding a chilling aura of death.

The vortex of the inscription echoed the vortex of the black spring. The primordial energy within the entire underground space surged wildly!
Each rapidly spinning black character on the stone tablet trailed a solid black ribbon of light. Similarly, the swirling, inky-black water from the spring stirred up countless surging streams of dark energy!
Countless black light streaks began to spin rapidly! They were no longer gentle lines; each one, as it spun, transformed into a spatial saw blade with absolute cutting power!

Om-!
A piercing shriek erupted! The entire space was completely filled with countless high-speed rotating black saw blades that sliced ​​through space! The light bands intersected, ran parallel, and rotated, turning the entire underground cavern into a precise and deadly cutting cage, a net of death!
All entities standing here will be instantly shredded, as if falling into millions of high-speed rotating blades!
Destructive power of rules permeates every corner! The primordial energy of heaven and earth scattered here is drawn away by these black lines, compressed into bundles, and then transformed into new, sharper black lines, multiplying infinitely!

At the heart of the storm, Zhao Qing was like an insignificant speck of dust. Thousands upon thousands of terrifying black lines, enough to instantly shred a sixth-realm cultivator, passed through her body without hindrance, as if traversing nothingness!

Her blue dress was completely undamaged!

The moment the black lines touched the area within a foot of her body, their trajectories suddenly and inexplicably deviated!
The space around her was strangely distorted and folded, as if the saw blades had crashed into an infinitely nested loop, grazing her outline with destructive force, colliding with each other, and disappearing!
Her body seemed to exist on another level that was inextricably linked to the real world. Those spatial saw blades that were powerful enough to tear apart ordinary grandmasters could not even touch her true existence!

Judging from all the appearances and layouts, whether it is the golden pagoda's radiance or the final frenzied eruption of the killing formation, it strongly suggests that the elixir of immortality should be kept inside the golden pagoda, and there are probably other new restrictions inside.

But Zhao Qing slowly descended, landing at the edge of the spring. His gaze pierced through the myriad changes of the dark vortex. He casually cut off a strand of hair, which transformed into hundreds of small stars and hurled them out, hitting the core "thread" knot that maintained the existence of the killing formation—the channel through which the energy of the golden pagoda, the stone tablet, and the living spring flowed.

As if its spine had been ripped out, the countless black saw blades that filled the cavern instantly disintegrated and vanished, like a dream. The violent storm of primordial energy within the space abruptly subsided, and the restrictive power that suppressed spiritual senses and distorted the seven consciousnesses also receded like a tide.

Zhao Qing smiled as he looked down at the bottom of the spring. He saw that the bottom of the living spring was not filled with ordinary silt, but with large patches of fine, purplish-black quicksand, shimmering with a strange light.

Its color gradually fades from the edges to the center, transitioning from deep purple to near black to light purple, and finally turning into a nearly colorless, off-white...

These fine sands are undoubtedly the vital foundation supporting that terrifying killing formation, and are one of the rare treasures here.

Then, she reached out and gently brushed it across, like the most skillful comb brushing through sand, or like an invisible net gently lifting it.

Each grain of sand silently gathered and flew up, hovering above Zhao Qing's palm, forming a slowly rotating, dazzling, miniature hourglass-shaped nebula.

It was as if the truth had finally come to light.

A single, crystal-clear ray of light quietly peeked through the receding sand. Pure and profound, it contained the infinite potential for life and death. Then, more and more dazzling light surged and released from the depths of their embrace! A brilliant silver glow!

When the bottom of the spring is completely clear, only a silver crystal ball, half an inch in diameter and of pure color, floats quietly against the finally revealed empty background.

Countless crystal fragments of varying sizes and irregular shapes, all shimmering with the same brilliant silver light, orbited, hovered, and drifted around the main crystal sphere like the most loyal satellites!

Like ice, it constantly melts, shatters, and is constantly regenerated and changed, containing profound and mysterious laws of primordial energy.

Birth and death, gathering and scattering, formation and destruction, all endlessly cycle and play out within this tiny crystal sphere, forming a wondrous picture of dynamic perpetual renewal and self-consistent perfection! And below it, where the sand and gravel have disappeared, the hard, dark blue stone surface is revealed, like a starry night sky over a desolate wasteland.

Like the starry sky, there are many points of light on the hard stone surface. They are tiny holes, but they are arranged in a very orderly manner, corresponding one by one to the positions of many stars in the sky.

"...The power of the Nine Realms of Longevity is simply too vast. To even begin to comprehend its origin, break through the outer chip blockade, and decipher the billions of law lines at its core, one would at least need to step into the realm of half-step into the Nine Realms on some level."

"This is something that ordinary people in the Eighth Realm cannot reach or touch, unless they have a special technique like the Nine Deaths Silkworm."

Zhao Qing sighed sincerely, for while ordinary cultivators could only see ordinary scenes, she saw profound changes in the laws of primordial energy:

Countless threads of law, like transparent harp strings, shattered on the outside of the silver crystal sphere; some bounced off as if broken, while others seeped into it.

It was as if it had crossed the Roche limit and was instantly torn apart and shredded by the "tidal force" at the level of laws;

The former became a "ring of stars" orbiting it, while the latter fell onto the surface of the "celestial body," where it further decomposed and transformed into extremely pure primordial energy and mysterious runes.

The fragmented law fragments from the outside world were constantly absorbed and assimilated by the remains of this ninth-realm immortal, and they formed those ever-changing crystal chips!
"It truly is immune to all laws! Even a peak eighth-realm cultivator using a destructive technique like Void Slicing wouldn't be able to leave the slightest damage on its core crystal sphere! It's on a completely different level! A true ninth-realm cultivator is almost on par with the fundamental laws of heaven and earth."

This has actually long surpassed the ordinary sense of law-based life, and is a more... immortal, more 'constant' existence!

In the depths of his being, Zhao Qing felt a strong intuition: just as the threads of law would be torn apart by beings of the Ninth Realm if they crossed a boundary similar to the "Roche limit," a relatively weak Ninth Realm expert who had just attained immortality, if unfortunately collided with another Ninth Realm expert who was far stronger than the former—for example, the vast will contained within the star itself—naturally emanating a "domain" or "law density gradient field"... its own stable structure and the strings of primordial energy laws would also suffer a devastating tearing by the "tidal force"!
The Nether Emperor, who has already entered the Ninth Realm, has recently been hiding on the far side of the moon and is unable to return to Earth, which is probably due to this reason.

"So, the cause of death of the 'elixir of immortality'... or rather, the reason why its consciousness fell into a long slumber, and it is unknown whether it will be able to revive for thousands or tens of thousands of years, should be that it rashly descended into this world, encountered the situation I deduced, was devoured by the will of the earth, and was instantly shattered to pieces and died here."

"However..." Zhao Qing's mind raced, and a new question arose, "Why is it so unwise?"

"An being capable of crossing the threshold of the ninth realm in the distant starry sky, even if not of human race, must possess extraordinary intelligence, one in a billion. Knowing the terror of the will of the stars, why would they foolishly fall down and needlessly throw their lives away? There must be a deeper, more crucial reason!"

"Go back! Traceen to its roots!"

Deep within Zhao Qing's eyes, the golden and silver light of his primordial spirit flowed endlessly, and the "Destiny Abilities" deduction method he had cultivated in the past was elevated to its extreme.

Her consciousness pierced through the ever-changing rings of laws on the outer layer of the crystal sphere, following the countless strands of ancient energy remaining here, traversing endless time and space, attempting to capture fragments of the other party's past memories and images.

The surrounding scenery suddenly blurred and collapsed, then burst open again in the next instant!

Zhao Qing's "vision" seemed to be thrown into a vast, desolate, cold, and dimly lit space.

This was the crucial moment when, hundreds of thousands of years ago, the original body of this "elixir of immortality" broke through the barriers of the Eight Realms and attained the Ninth Realm!

Not where Earth is, but at the far edge of the solar system, in the orbit of the outer satellite of the ninth planet she discovered using an antenna array at Zhanghuatai.

Against the backdrop of the vast starry sky, an enormous, amber-colored, wood-like sphere, like a sleeping giant egg, floats silently, absorbing the essence of planetary rings and interstellar dust.

Its diameter is a staggering over a thousand feet! Its surface seems to be woven and solidified from billions of gnarled, twisted roots that exude the rhythm of life. The texture is deep and mysterious, full of vitality, and entangled with countless powerful and unfamiliar lines of primordial energy laws.

It is undergoing a grand and solitary transformation, accumulating power sufficient to shake the void.

Zhao Qing pondered for a moment, understanding the essence of the matter: "Entering the eighth realm requires emptying one's own essence, energy, and spirit to attract a new world, breaking through and then establishing... I never imagined that the secret of longevity in the ninth realm also follows a similar principle: breaking through the 'natal world' prison that one has originally nurtured and reached its limit?!"

In the scene, the light surrounding the thousand-foot-tall purple jade sphere suddenly became extremely unstable and violent! It was not absorbing power from the outside, but rather drawing upon the immense true essence that had accumulated in its core for thousands of years, causing it to collapse, condense, and ignite wildly inward!
Then, it completely shattered and disintegrated from the inside out! The indestructible, massive shell instantly shattered, turning into countless tiny specks of dust, each carrying its original consciousness and the threads of its laws.

But it is not the end of self-destruction!

This is called "casting a net"!
An invisible yet boundless "net" rapidly spread and permeated, instantly enveloping the void at the center of the exploding sphere—a void far larger than its original size!

Over the next few centuries, that invisible "Great Dao Net" gradually tightened over this area of ​​thousands of miles! Like a net catching a school of fish, it enveloped vast swathes of stellar energy, laws, and wandering Daoist principles. After a long period of time, these elements condensed, solidified, and merged together!
Finally, at the center point where the original purple jade wooden ball had been annihilated, it collapsed inward again, coalesced into a single piece, and transformed into a brand new, silvery, radiant natal star with a complex vortex of starlight flowing inside—the Nine Realms Longevity Dao Fruit—naturally born at the center of the net!

Like a silkworm transforming into a butterfly! Like a shattered path becoming a star!
This time, there were no earth-shattering phenomena, only the perfect harmony of the self-consistent laws.

...(End of chapter)