Chapter 2196: Entering the Canglan Ten Thousand Realms

Chapter 2196: Entering the Canglan Ten Thousand Realms

The human world was vast, but Mu Yun had long since outgrown it.

Standing alone at the edge of the divine realm, where the sky met the boundary wall of the Ten Thousand World Seal, he could feel the cracks — hairline fractures in the ancient barrier that separated the human world from the Canglan Ten Thousand Realms beyond. The battle had left its marks. The seal was incomplete, just as he had said in the great hall.

But that was precisely why he was here.

"You're really doing this yourself?" Guiyi's voice drifted up from the depths of the scroll, skeptical as always. "Repairing the seal alone. No helpers. Just you."

"The ancestors would only slow me down," Mu Yun said simply. "And I don't want them to see the cracks. If they knew how unstable the boundary is, they would worry."

"So you lied to them."

"I said I could handle it alone. That part was true."

Guiyi was quiet for a moment. Then, with characteristic dryness: "And the part about actually repairing it?"

Mu Yun didn't answer immediately. He pressed his palm flat against the boundary wall — invisible to the naked eye, but to his semi-sacred perception it was a vast, trembling membrane of compressed divine law, stretched thin in places where the ancient tribes had once poured their strongest attacks. He could feel the fractures running through it like cracks in old porcelain.

He could repair them.

It would take time, and it would cost him something.

But it could be done.

"The seal doesn't need to be perfect," Mu Yun said at last. "It just needs to hold long enough for the Qingyun League to grow strong enough that nothing coming through would matter anyway."

"That's a very optimistic definition of 'repaired.'"

"I'm an optimistic person."

"You're a reckless person who has learned to sound optimistic."

Mu Yun smiled and said nothing. He began to move along the boundary wall, his hands trailing across the surface, threading his semi-sacred Qi into the fractures one by one. The work was delicate — more delicate than any battle he had ever fought. Brute force would shatter what remained. This required precision, patience, and a kind of stillness that didn't come naturally to him.

But he had learned stillness, over these years.

He had learned it the hard way.

Hours passed. The sky above the divine realm shifted from gold to deep violet as evening came on. Below him, far in the distance, he could see the lights of the herdsmen's territory beginning to appear — small warm points of fire scattered across the vast darkness of the land.

His land.

His people.

'When I come back,' he had told them, 'I want to see the Qingyun League thriving.'

He meant it. Every word.

Mu Qinglang would lead well — his second uncle had always been steadier than he let on, and the responsibility would sharpen him further. Zhan Chonghuan and Zhao Yan were capable deputies. The three ancestors understood the weight of what was being built.

And Yun Zhongwu, Mu Bai — they hadn't said a word about following him. They had simply stood there with their heads bowed slightly, accepting it.

That had hurt more than he expected.

'Don't make that face,' he told himself. 'They understood. That's why they didn't argue.'

He found another fracture in the seal and pressed his Qi into it carefully.

"You're thinking about them again," Guiyi observed.

"Shut up."

"You told them you'd come back when the Qingyun League was thriving. Do you actually believe you'll see it?"

"Yes."

"The Canglan Ten Thousand Realms has ten thousand races and powers you've never encountered. You're entering it as a prisoner of a saint-level being, by choice, with no backup, no familiarity with the terrain, and no plan beyond 'find my parents and nine wives.'"

"That's not entirely accurate. I have you."

"I'm a damaged divine artifact with partial memory loss and no physical body. I'm barely a plan."

"You're better than nothing."

"That is the least comforting thing anyone has ever said to me."

Mu Yun laughed — quietly, so it wouldn't carry on the wind. It was the laugh of someone who was genuinely, unreasonably happy despite everything, and knew it.

He sealed another fracture. Then another.

By the time the moon was high, the worst of the damage was contained. Not perfect — Guiyi was right about that. But stable. The Qingyun League would have time.

That was all he needed to give them.

He found the dead body Wuming's trail at the eastern edge of the boundary — a disturbance in the fabric of the seal where something of saint-level power had passed through recently, forcing a temporary corridor in the barrier wall.

The corridor had already begun to close, the ancient law of the seal pressing inward to fill the gap.

Mu Yun stood before it and calculated quickly.

He had perhaps an hour before it closed entirely.

"Last chance to change your mind," Guiyi said.

Mu Yun looked back one final time at the divine realm — at the distant lights, the vast dark shape of mountains he had crossed a hundred times, the faint outline of the herdsmen's territory against the night sky.

Somewhere out there, Qin Mengyao and Mingyuexin were already traveling through space-time tunnels toward the Canglan Ten Thousand Realms. He had felt it — the connection through the nine sacred monuments, faint but unmistakable, like a thread pulled taut across an impossible distance.

They were alive. They were moving.

He would find them.

He would find his father and mother.

He would find all of them.

"No," Mu Yun said. "I'm not changing my mind."

He stepped through the corridor.

The boundary wall closed behind him with a sound like a held breath finally released, and the human world disappeared.

What struck him first was the weight of the spiritual energy.

In the divine realm, spiritual energy was abundant — far more than the mortal world, far more than the immortal realm had been in its declining years. But this was different. The Canglan Ten Thousand Realms breathed with a density of power that pressed against his skin like deep water. Every breath he drew felt heavier, richer, more saturated with ancient Qi than anything he had known before.

'So this is where the truly powerful are born,' he thought.

He was in open sky, high above a landscape he didn't recognize — a vast grassland stretching to every horizon, interrupted here and there by distant formations of dark rock and, at the very edge of visibility, the outline of a city.

Below him, perhaps five hundred meters down, he could see a procession moving across the grassland.

The bone cage.

Wuming's people, carrying it.

Mu Yun adjusted his position carefully, keeping himself still in the air, suppressing his Qi to its absolute minimum. He had entered the corridor ahead of the procession — the corridor's geometry had compressed the distance. He had come through clean, undetected.

Good.

The procession moved steadily toward the distant city. Mu Yun watched it from above, cataloguing what he could see. Fifteen figures in total, including Wuming himself at the head — moving with the unhurried confidence of someone who expected no resistance. The bone cage at the center of the procession was empty, of course — a hollow decoy, sealed with Wuming's power to maintain the illusion of weight and presence.

Mu Yun had constructed the illusion himself before stepping through the boundary. A simple trick, but effective against someone who hadn't expected it.

Now he was free, and Wuming's people were escorting an empty cage toward their stronghold.

"Well," Guiyi said, with something approaching genuine appreciation. "You actually pulled it off."

"I told you I had my own measures."

"You also told me the seal was repaired."

"It's stable. That counts."

A warm wind moved across the grassland below, bending the long grass in slow waves. In the distance, the city's outline sharpened slightly as clouds shifted and moonlight fell across it. It was large — larger than anything in the divine realm, built in layers that rose against the dark sky like a stepped mountain.

The Sanyuan Realm, Mu Yun thought, recalling the name. Dragon rhinoceros tribe, two-winged silver lions, corpse beast tribe. A place where multiple races lived together, which meant politics, alliances, rivalries — the whole complex web of power that he would need to understand quickly.

He would need information. He would need to move carefully.

He would need, above all, to find Qin Mengyao and Mingyuexin before Wuming's people realized the cage was empty and came looking for him.

'That gives me until morning at most,' he estimated. 'Possibly less.'

He looked at the vast, unfamiliar sky above the Canglan Ten Thousand Realms — different stars, a different quality of darkness, a world that knew nothing about him and had no particular reason to welcome him.

He had entered it as a nobody. No title. No lineage that meant anything here. No army, no resources, no allies.

Just himself, Guiyi, and the thread of connection pulling him toward the people he loved.

"Guiyi," he said quietly.

"What."

"Tell me everything you remember about the Canglan Ten Thousand Realms."

A long pause.

"...It might take a while."

"We have time." Mu Yun descended slowly toward the grassland, moving parallel to the procession below, keeping his distance. "Start from the beginning."

"The beginning," Guiyi muttered. "Boy, the beginning of the Canglan Ten Thousand Realms predates everything you've ever known by approximately forty thousand years."

"Then you'd better start talking."

Below him, the grassland whispered in the warm wind, and the lights of the distant city beckoned, and somewhere out there in the vast dark of the Ten Thousand Realms, his people were waiting to be found.

Mu Yun walked forward.