Yue Yang felt as though he’d been dreaming a very, very long dream.

So much had happened in that dream — he’d seen countless people, creatures he’d never laid eyes on before, life-forms whose very existence he never could have imagined, all moving around him. The world inside that dream had been a place of extraordinary beauty, one that even every language in existence couldn’t have captured even a fraction of.

In that dreamworld, Yue Yang sensed a pair of little girls had stayed by his side the entire time.

They were small, and endlessly mischievous.

Running circles around him constantly, never willing to settle down for even a moment.

There was also an older girl, oddly familiar, who stayed quietly at his side, never saying a word, following him wherever he went like his own shadow. Whenever he turned to look at her, she’d simply smile, and still say nothing.

The dreamworld was full of countless people. They all seemed familiar somehow, yet looking closer, their faces felt like strangers’—he couldn’t put a name to a single one.

Men and women alike walked past him without pausing for even a moment. None of them responded to his questions or greetings; even when passing face to face, they’d walk on as if he weren’t there, chatting and laughing with their companions, drifting further and further away until they vanished behind him. All manner of impossibly rare creatures, life-forms he’d never once seen before, passed by him or flew overhead the same way, as if heading to some great gathering—some even chased each other along the way, occasionally breaking into outright conflict, fighting fiercely…

Most of the creatures in the dream were gentle and good-natured, and it seemed the gentler and more good-natured a creature was, the more beautiful it looked and the more powerful it was. A rare few were vicious, and their strength wasn’t lacking either. But the instant any fight broke out, someone would appear out of nowhere to drive the combatants apart.

This dreamworld seemed to be a place of peace, where violence wasn’t tolerated, where no one was permitted to simply attack at will.

Isn’t that my Genesis Orb? In the dream, Yue Yang stumbled upon his own Genesis Orb floating ahead of him, hovering within some shattered void, endlessly drawing in some kind of energy. The moment Yue Yang stepped into that shattered void, he was struck by just how vast it truly was. This shattered void was so unimaginably enormous that his eyes alone couldn’t take in its full extent — he could only sense it with his mind.

He sensed that if the Dragon-Soaring Continent were treated as a single point, this shattered void could easily contain tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of points just like it.

Once inside the shattered void, Yue Yang made an even more staggering discovery: beyond this shattered void, everywhere around the dreamworld was made up of points just like it — some far larger than this shattered void, others far smaller. Seen from a distance, these countless points wove together into a single sphere of light; pulling back further with his mind to view that sphere from even greater distance, there were countless more spheres of light still further out… and pulling back to the absolute limit, all of those spheres of light wove together into a single sea of light, and beyond that sea of light, still more seas of light stretched on, endlessly, without limit.

There was nothing left for Yue Yang to feel but his own smallness, his own insignificance.

Forget a single person — even an entire world, set against a system this vast, was nothing more than an insignificant grain of sand.

Points of light more numerous than grains of sand, spheres of light formed from countless points, seas of light formed from countless spheres… everything within was in constant motion. Fixing his attention on any one spot, Yue Yang noticed that the paths some of these points or spheres traced bore a faint resemblance to ancient runes, while the larger movements of the spheres and seas of light resembled the legendary primordial script of myth.

The instant that realization dawned on him, every one of those countless, sand-like worlds surged toward him all at once.

An overwhelming flood of knowledge and energy came pouring in, utterly without restraint, filling the entire shattered void he occupied to bursting in an instant.

Yue Yang felt a sharp, splitting pain explode through his skull, as if it were about to burst apart entirely.

Not even when he’d received knowledge transmissions in the past had he felt anything like this forced, instantaneous overload threatening to detonate his own mind. Worst of all, even his brain — capable of holding the knowledge transmission from Fourth Sister and the merged consciousness of countless predecessors from the World Tree — couldn’t withstand this for more than a few seconds. Yue Yang estimated that the contents of just a single sphere of light alone would be enough to blow his mind apart completely, and yet there remained countless spheres making up a sea of light, and countless seas beyond that… Panic shot through him. At this rate, his life was about to be over.

The Genesis Orb in his hand suddenly flared with a dazzling light.

It began endlessly absorbing the energy and knowledge pouring in, shouldering that overwhelming, world-blanketing pressure on Yue Yang’s behalf.

His Grimoire of Summoning, too — somehow already floating free on its own — and the World itself were both madly drinking in that same energy and knowledge, ascending and growing at a rate visible to the naked eye, advancing, strengthening…

Behind Yue Yang, something else seemed to be present as well, diverting and absorbing as much of that knowledge and energy pouring into him as it possibly could. But Yue Yang couldn’t tell what it was. A treasure? A life-guardian war beast? No — perhaps it was that second grimoire he’d never once managed to successfully summon, the sacred codex he’d only ever glimpsed once, in a moment of half-conscious blur!

Yes. That was what was diverting the pressure away from him.

Yue Yang wanted to turn and look.

But the overwhelming force pouring into him left him unable to so much as blink, let alone turn his head.

Under that mind-shattering, body-crushing pressure, even with some of it diverted away, what remained was still unbelievably immense. Yue Yang’s consciousness began to slip — forget absorbing the knowledge and energy of countless seas of light, even taking in a single sphere of light alone was already pushing him past his limit. After all, a single sphere of light was made up of countless points, each one more numerous than grains of sand, and each individual point was the equivalent of an entire vast shattered-void world unto itself…

Why is this happening to me? Why am I suddenly receiving this double overload of energy and knowledge from all these points, spheres, and seas of light?

Yue Yang couldn’t make sense of it.

In the instant before he lost consciousness, he felt what seemed like a hand pressing down on the top of his head.

An incredibly gentle stream of energy seeped in, reaching straight down into his very soul. The sensation felt as though his brain had suddenly been thrown wide open, its capacity vastly expanded in an instant, and the agonizing pain in his skull eased into something almost pleasant.

Who was it?

Who was helping him?

There wasn’t time for his consciousness to dwell on it further before Yue Yang slipped into unconsciousness entirely.

By the time he came to and opened his eyes again, he found himself lying in Liuye’s arms, the girl’s face streaked with tears, crying her heart out.

Overhead, the sky-spanning formation, still stretching a thousand li wide, remained in place — but its central region and core had vanished completely, as though they’d never existed at all. Beyond that change, Yue Yang also sensed that, somewhere in his own spiritual world, the Genesis Orb had somehow ended up lodged inside something — and that it now seemed to carry with it a shattered void world, no longer entirely shattered?

Inside that world, an unimaginably vast void was slowly healing itself. Fractured patches still remained, but far fewer than before.

Chaos energy, vast as an ocean, sat quietly stored within, its origin a mystery.

So immense that Yue Yang didn’t dare even touch it.

He was afraid that the slightest disturbance might trigger something far more catastrophic than any earthquake or mountain collapsing…

With this much chaos energy at his disposal, a shattered void world this colossal, and a divine artifact that had — at some point he hadn’t even noticed — evolved from a Genesis Orb into a true Genesis Divine Pearl, moving in perfect sync with his own will and intent, Yue Yang suddenly felt a rising sense that he himself was the creator of this entire world. If he wished it, he could use that chaos energy to fashion absolutely anything, at any time.

The only regret was that he himself didn’t yet possess the ability to actually command an ocean of chaos energy this vast.

It felt like a child who’d opened a storehouse and found himself in possession of more gold than any mountain, more than any sea could hold — capable, in theory, of building an entire palace out of solid gold whenever he pleased, only to be held back by his own small size and limited strength, unable to actually begin construction. A genuine, frustrating shame.

“Oh well, can’t be done now. There’s always someday.” Yue Yang had always been an optimist at heart.

“You’re awake?” Only now did Liuye realize that the Yue Yang cradled in her arms had finally come back to consciousness, and she let out a delighted, startled cry. “You have no idea how worried I was, you scared me half to death…”

“How many days was I out?” Yue Yang felt that something about his entire body had changed, though he couldn’t quite say exactly what.

“Three days. You were out cold for a full three days, and nothing I tried could wake you. If Xiao Wenli and Duoduo hadn’t been here, and if Bingyin hadn’t told me you’d be fine and that I shouldn’t do anything rash, I would’ve gone running back to beg forgiveness from the Divine Punishment Empress and the others.” Liuye laughed and cried at the same time, and seeing Yue Yang awake again felt better to her than anything else in the world. If she’d known beforehand just how dangerous this treasure hunt would turn out to be, she never would have agreed to let Yue Yang go searching for the ancient treasure at all — and even if she’d still come along, she certainly wouldn’t have let him force his way into the central region to confront that ancient rune core head-on.

“Ha, silly girl, how could anything happen to me? I just merged with some ancient runes and took a nap, that’s all!” Yue Yang laughed it off with deliberate ease, reaching out to pat the top of Liuye’s head and gently wipe the tears from her cheeks.

“I really was worried, you know!” Liuye apologized, looking a little embarrassed.

Once Yue Yang sat up, he noticed that his own body now flickered faintly in and out of view, countless ancient runes glimmering across it.

Could everything in that dream have been real?

Or had his own body devoured that ancient rune core, woven from who-knew-how-many layers? Were the people and events he’d encountered in the dream actual memories from some ancient era? Were those creatures and life-forms he’d seen things that had genuinely once existed? Setting all that aside — who exactly had been there with him, helping him close that final distance to the core?

Bingyin the Qilin girl had definitely been there. The phoenix sisters seemed to have appeared too.

The Sword Spirit Imperial Lady — had she lent him her sword to help, somewhere in there?

Yue Yang wasn’t entirely sure.

As for whoever had been diverting the pressure away from him in the dream — besides the Genesis Orb and his Grimoire of Summoning, there had been something else behind him as well. Could that have been the sacred codex?

And in the end, whoever had pressed a hand to the top of his head right before he passed out, opening up his mental capacity — who had that been?

Was any of it real, or had it all been illusion?

The more Yue Yang turned it over in his mind, the more confused he got. But per his own lazy-man’s principle, whatever he couldn’t figure out, he simply wouldn’t bother trying to — answers had a way of surfacing on their own, eventually.

He couldn’t summon the sacred codex while fully conscious, so there was no way to examine it directly. The Genesis Divine Pearl, on the other hand, had clearly undergone a new evolution and transformation — that much was plain to see. But it now carried with it an entire shattered void world, filled near to overflowing with chaos energy. Yue Yang could look at it, but he didn’t dare touch it, afraid that the moment he did, he’d lose control of it entirely.

The only thing he could actually take out and examine was his own Grimoire of Summoning.

Had what happened in the dream been real, or not?

Yue Yang reached out and summoned his Grimoire with a thought. A burst of seven-colored radiance bloomed outward, and his Grimoire of Summoning rose into the air amid a shower of flower-like light, radiating a power and brilliance utterly unlike anything it had shown before…

“A… a Sacred Codex?” Yue Yang stared, slack-jawed, at the familiar yet utterly unrecognizable Grimoire of Summoning floating before him.

When had his own Grimoire of Summoning ascended into a Sacred Codex?

He had absolutely no idea.

And looking closer, this Sacred Codex of his didn’t quite resemble any of the others he knew — not the one the Heavenly Empress had lost upon her death, not the one the Supreme had absorbed and ascended into after defeating the Heavenly Empress, not the ancient Demon Sovereign’s Sacred Codex, not the Void titan’s among the Heavenly Realm’s great powers, not Mingyueguang’s among the three titans, not even the Solar King’s, whom he’d only recently killed — nor even Empress Vivienne’s Sacred Codex, the one Yue Yang had seen and studied more thoroughly than any other.

Had Yue Yang not, in the very instant of summoning it, instinctively and intuitively understood within his own soul that this was indeed a Sacred Codex, he might have suspected this was something even greater — a true Divine Codex!

Wasn’t this power just a little too much?

For a moment, Yue Yang couldn’t help the swelling, exhilarating thought rising unbidden in his chest: with a Sacred Codex in hand, the whole world is mine!

(End of Chapter)