Chapter 23: A Lifetime

Fine, fine, one by one. I’ll make a list…

Looking at the exclamation marks above everyone’s heads in despair, I took out my notebook and noted down each person’s request one by one.

“Dahlia wants Resurrection for her lover, Silian and Xunfang both want a pot of good wine, Qiao Xiaoxian wants to invite me to take the Stellar Faction membership test, and Jiang Ke’er wants me to help her play the pig to eat the tiger…”

Ah—what a pain.

“Missions must be done one by one, and there’s an order to things. Let’s start with the Western Fox first.”

After all, I promised Dahlia I’d help find her lover first.

“Is that it?” Dahlia asked in shock. “Don’t you need to rest for a few days to stabilize your realm?”

“No need, I’ve reached this level before, so I’m familiar with the path. As for you, once you summon back the Linghun, you’ll need a vessel, right? Don’t you need to prepare the Materials in advance?”

“I prepared the Materials and the ritual long ago; all that’s missing is the Linghun.”

“Good, then everyone step back a little. I’m getting ready to open the door to The Otherworld.”

As agreed before, after Earthly Ascension, I would open the door to that mysterious World.

In that World, time is a line; there’s no concept of three dimensions, and it exists in a form we find difficult to comprehend…

There, we can travel backwards along the timeline and arrive directly at the point where Dahlia’s lover still exists.

Cluru nodded obediently.

Then, I closed my eyes to search for the feeling. Combining it with the characters I had just learned from Qiao Xiaoxian, I summoned a door in front of me.

That door was pitch black, as if it were a Dark Void in the World, leading to the void.

But I knew that what lay behind the door was more than just the void.

“We can go now.”

I waved to Dahlia.

I stepped through the door first to scout the way.

Then came Dahlia.

Then Cluru.

…Wait?! Cluru??

“Didn’t you promise not to come?!” I glared at Cluru, keeping my voice low and angry. “It’s dangerous here!”

Yet Cluru looked aggrieved.

“I don’t know… As soon as you opened this door, I felt like… I should come in. I don’t know why, really.”

“Really?”

“Really!” Cluru’s eyes were one hundred percent clear, without any sign of evasion.

I sighed and held Cluru, letting her hang on my back with her Tentacles.

I believed her.

She wouldn’t lie to me.

There were still many unsolved mysteries surrounding Cluru, whether it was the Power of Creation she was born with or the Pink Seal she had branded onto my belly… To this day, I hadn’t been able to figure them out.

Perhaps there would be answers here.

“Hold on tight, and don’t leave my side,” I said.

Cluru nodded.

Setting aside my worries about Cluru’s safety for now, Jieliya and I looked around.

Our feet were not standing on a flat surface because there was no concept of surfaces here.

Like a fragmented kaleidoscope, everything here could not be perceived or seen with the naked eye.

We could only use Divine Sense.

We simply closed our eyes.

The Divine Sense had a high compatibility with this place.

Under the scrutiny of Divine Sense, everything here manifested into forms we could somewhat understand, appearing within our minds.

Only then did we find a path, controlling our bodies to move forward by crawling and rolling at times.

To the Divine Sense, this place “looked” like a library.

There were crisscrossing bookshelves, but they didn’t exist in the form of wooden shelves; instead, they were long Rivers.

I couldn’t count how many Rivers were here. Looking out, I couldn’t see the end at all, and countless Rivers were woven together like hemp ropes, crisscrossing each other.

In such a vast World, no matter how powerful our Divine Sense was, it would be impossible to find the specific River we were looking for.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to look for it at all.

When we appeared here, the “long Rivers” related to us actively twisted and approached us.

I “looked” toward the River and accidentally browsed through my own failed life again.

The River was playing out every fragment of my life, from the present to the past, and even the future.

“Is this your experience?”

Unfortunately, Dahlia also saw me within this River.

I nodded. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

“The World’s people despise suffering, but suffering always forges the strong,” Dahlia said.

She exuded an intellectual aura that made me feel comfortable, as if… she truly had far too much life experience and thus genuinely understood me.

“Even though this was never what you wanted,” Dahlia shrugged.

I smiled.

Then, with a tacit understanding, we looked toward the past, not sparing a single glance at the other end of the long River—the future.

Knowing the future is something needed only by those with ambition but no confidence. I don’t need it.

“There’s nothing much to see in my past. Let’s follow your River.”

Dahlia nodded.

Just now, two Rivers had been attracted to my side: one was from my time on Earth, and the other was from the Cultivation World.

As for Dahlia, at first there was one River, then two, then three, then four…

We walked against time, heading toward the very beginning of Dahlia’s life.

More and more Rivers were being attracted to her side.

Five, ten, a hundred, a thousand…

Cluru and I grew more shocked as we watched.

At this point, we had even reached the end of many Rivers. Because we were traveling against time, those were likely the moments of a World’s origin.

These Rivers left Dahlia’s side, but the number of Rivers around her didn’t decrease in the slightest!!

One origin connected to the explosive annihilation of another River. We walked from annihilation to origin once more, only to connect to another annihilation.

I couldn’t imagine exactly how many moments of River annihilation Dahlia had experienced.

The dense lines of the Rivers and the terrifying amount of information they carried had already completely exceeded the limits of my perception.

We continued forward like this. Dahlia was surrounded by one long River after another as she walked from the end of each River to its beginning.

Even this dark and eerie World seemed to distort because of her.

Until…

Suddenly, the Rivers around Jieliya began to decrease.

In just the blink of an eye, almost all the Rivers vanished, leaving only a single one.

It was her sitting amidst the starry sky, which was her state for most of the time in the many Rivers that followed.

She just sat blankly on some planet, or let her body drift through space, being mindlessly struck by space debris.

Her eyes were dull as she numbly watched the infinite starry sky. She was like a piece of dead wood that refused to rot.

Yet, this was an exceptionally long River. We continued forward along it.

We walked and walked.

We walked and walked.

With every step, we crossed hundreds or thousands of years, yet she in the void remained exactly the same.

I even walked until I was sleepy, starting to wonder if I had encountered a ghost wall.

Isn’t this too long? Translated into time, how long has it been?

I couldn’t help but look at Jieliya, wanting to ask her what was going on.

But her calm expression and steady footsteps made me abandon the idea.

This wasn’t a ghost wall, and there was no bug in the River of Time.

She knew that this was her life.