Chapter 1365

Maybe there is a path to a higher realm there, or a more complete legacy of the Chaos Grand Dao.

But he didn't set off right away. Leaving a realm is no simple matter, especially when one's cultivation has reached his level, involving great karma and the power of realms, requiring meticulous preparation.

First, he must resolve the karma of this realm. Although he usually wanders alone, after years of cultivation in this realm and experiencing secret-realm conflicts, he has an agreement with Jing Xuzi and Yue Li Xianzi, and has also incurred a grudge with Bai Gu Zhenjun. He needs to settle each matter to avoid karmic entanglement during ascension that could bring disaster.

Second, he needs to gather and refine several key treasures. First, a protective talisman to stabilize himself and resist the external void's power and unknown dangers; second, to further repair the Space Compass fragments, enhancing positioning and navigation for breaking through realms; third, to find the last few crucial materials for the Chaos Primordial Sword Embryo, helping it fully mature and unleash its edge, becoming his powerful aid in traversing realms.

Finally, he still needs to find a suitable breach point. Forcibly tearing open the realm's barrier is not impossible, but it would consume enormous resources and could easily trigger a backlash from the Qiong Hua Realm's laws, making it not worth the cost. It is better to seek a natural spatial weak point, or… to make use of some ancient relics such as an Ascension Platform or the remnants of a Starry Ancient Road.

It seems he still needs to wander the Qiong Hua Realm a bit longer. Yan Buji rose to his full height, took a step, and stood outside the cave abode. With a wave of his hand, he erased all the set restrictions and lingering aura within the cave abode, leaving no trace.

He stood with his hands behind his back on the peak of a lone mountain, gazing out over the sea of clouds. The ordinary gray robe on his body fluttered in the strong wind, his aura mundane, yet he possessed an inexplicable air of looking down on heaven and earth, as if about to transcend and depart.

Chaos knows no years; beyond the realms, time is unknown.

Since leaving the Qiong Hua Realm, Yan Buji's figure has threaded through the cracks of the heavens and drifted among the ruins of stars. He has tread upon the remnants of exhausted stars, crossed shattered continents where laws have collapsed, ventured into dead star domains where spiritual energy is exhausted and all things extinct, and even briefly stayed in some border realms where laws are strange and civilizations differ.

Every world, whether whole or shattered, teeming with life or dead silent, is like an open book recording the different cosmic laws and the rise and fall of civilizations. Yan Buji is like the most patient reader, yet also the most voracious consumer, using the Chaos Core as his eyes and Chaos Power as his hands, drawing upon the remnants of these worlds' laws, civilizations' imprints, and even the traces that ultimately point to oblivion—the Return to the Void.

He once sat for a hundred years in a completely silent, ice‑sealed world, comprehending the ultimate stillness and cold contained within, a law nearly akin to time standing still, and fused its true meaning of "still cold" into the Chaos' End quadrant.

He once ventured into a shattered spacetime left over from an ancient immortal‑demon battlefield, where he battled the lingering vestiges of immortals and demons that had not dissipated due to obsession and killing intent, experiencing a completely different power system and way of combat, thereby enriching the Chaos' Flourishing variation.

He also once inadvertently entered a small world that was slowly undergoing the Return to the Void, personally witnessing how the laws of heaven and earth collapsed step by step, how the spiritual essence of all things was drawn away and dissipated by an invisible force, how beings struggled in despair and ultimately fell into eternal silence. Watching a world "die" in that way gave him a shock and insight far surpassing any secret manual, transforming his understanding of the Return to the Void from an abstract concept into a concrete realization weighted with a heavy sigh.

He was not without purpose. The few blurry coordinates among the fragments of the World Void Ancient Formation Stone Tablet were his main guide. Following that faint resonance, he crossed countless dangerous spatial turbulences and temporal rifts, several times nearly being swept into the Eternal Silence void vortex, or encountering terrifying, indescribable entities drifting in the realm gaps. The Chaos Power and the Space Compass fragments became his sole reliance in the endless void.

Along the way, he continually gathered materials to perfect himself. The Chaos Primordial Sword Embryo, after devouring the primal gold and strange killing qi of several shattered worlds, finally took complete form. On the day the sword was completed, its dull gray blade rang out on its own; though the edge remained sheathed, the mere natural emanation of its Chaos Sword Intent smoothed and devoured the spatial turbulences within a hundred‑li radius, revealing its supreme might as an embryonic form of the Chaos Supreme Treasure.

This sword does not focus on slaughter; its purpose is to "guide". Pointing the blade can draw forth an opponent's mana, blood, soul, and even the very essence of existence, accelerating them toward extinction, and can also draw forth Chaos vitality to create all things. This perfectly matches his Chaos Three Intentions circulating, the way of existence and extinction following the heart.

The Space Compass fragments were also continually nourished and completed by him using the precious space crystals and spacetime law fragments he gathered along the way; although they could not be fully restored to their ancient entirety, their abilities to position, traverse, and stabilize space have greatly increased, becoming his reliable star chart and ark for wandering the realms.

No one knows how many ages have passed—perhaps a thousand years, perhaps more. Yan Buji stepped into the world indicated by the final coordinate—a world almost completely dissolved into the Return to the Void's Dao resonance, with only a last point of core stubbornly flickering in a dying world.

Here there is no light, no sound, no matter, and even the concept of space is extremely thin. Only the purest, richest power of the Return to the Void remains, like a black tide permeating every inch of existence. This place is the concrete manifestation of termination, one of the final burial grounds of all things.

An ordinary Mahayana practitioner would likely have his Dao vanish and body perish in an instant, assimilated into the Return to the Void. But Yan Buji felt his inner Chaos Core awaken with unprecedented vigor… and hunger. The Chaos Cycle that fuses the Beginning, Flourishing, and End intentions, in this ultimate End environment, spontaneously accelerates its operation, especially the End aspect, which seems to return to the matrix, greedily absorbing the external Return to the Void Dao resonance and in turn stimulating the Beginning and Flourishing aspects, making the whole cycle more solid, complete, and endless.

He sat cross‑legged on this world's core—a fragment only a hundred zhang in size, emitting a faint immortal glow—and closed his eyes.

This time in seclusion, he does not ask after the years.

His consciousness sank completely into the depths of the Chaos Core, into the ever‑shifting cosmic tableau of birth and death. The endless Return to the Void resonance from the outside, like rivers flowing into the sea, was swallowed by the Chaos Core, transformed through the End quadrant, and turned into nourishment for the Beginning and Flourishing aspects. The speed of the Chaos Cycle grew ever faster, its scale ever larger, and its internal evolving visions became ever more realistic and grand.

At first, it was merely the birth and death of dust‑like nebulae. Gradually, stars were born and died, galaxies formed and collided. Later, it even began to evolve simple life forms, sparks of civilization, and… the extinction of civilizations. Birth, aging, sickness, death; formation, dwelling, decay, emptiness—the cycles of all sentient and insentient worlds played out within the ever‑expanding Chaos tableau.

He forgot time, forgot himself, even forgot that he was cultivating. His consciousness seemed to become the Chaos tableau itself, personally experiencing the immeasurable kalpas of cosmic rebirth.

At some point, the Chaos tableau, expanded to its limit, suddenly contracted inward.

It was not a collapse, but an ultimate condensation. All phenomena of birth and death, all law lines, all concepts of energy and matter, collapsed toward a single central point.

That point is infinitesimally small yet impossibly heavy, as if it bears the weight of the entire universe. It is neither black nor white, neither existence nor non‑existence, containing all possibilities and all endings.

The beginning and end of Chaos overlap at this moment.

Yan Buji's consciousness also, at this moment, merged with that point.

Click!

A sound that does not exist in reality resounded through his soul's origin and even echoed in the surrounding Return to the Void tide as a shattering noise.

It was not that something broke, but rather an intangible, incorporeal shackle that had bound him for ages shattered.

The limits of heaven and earth in the Qiong Hua Realm, the common definition of Mahayana peak among all realms, and every cultivation restraint beneath the rank of Immortal—at this moment they melted away like thin spring ice.

The Chaos Core has disappeared, or rather, it is no longer an independent core. That ultimate point is now his everything. His body, his mana, his soul, his Dao, even his very existence itself, have become the outward manifestation of that point.

A feeling of unprecedented completeness and freedom filled him.

With a thought in motion, he can evolve Chaos, cleave heaven and earth, create all beings; with a thought in stillness, he can cause all things to return to the Void, all laws to fall silent, and return to the origin. In his eyes, existence and extinction, life and death, beginning and end have no boundaries; they are two sides of the same whole, both within a single thought of Chaos.

He looked at his own seated body. That fleshly form still existed, but it was no longer a mortal body of flesh and blood, nor even a mere energy aggregate; it was a more essential mode of existence—the Chaos Holy Body. Every inch of skin, every drop of blood, contains the complete Chaos Grand Dao, invulnerable to all laws, indestructible through all kalpas. As long as the Chaos Grand Dao does not perish, this body will endure eternally.

He gazed at the outside world, almost completely surrendered to the Return to the Void. A slight stir of his mind made the all‑pervading tide, strong enough to wear down a Mahayana practitioner, behave like a docile pet, circling him and slowly flowing, being assimilated and absorbed by the natural Chaos qi emanating from his body, becoming a negligible supplement to his power.

Sage!

The legendary Sage Realm! Transcending the mundane, surpassing immortals and gods, one's own Dao perfected, united with the Truth of the Way, a word can become law for the world, a thought can move the stars of all heavens! This is the true threshold for entering the ranks of the cosmos' supreme powers!

Is this the realm that Han Wuxian can reach at any time?

Truly impressive, good thing I ran fast.

Yan Buji gave a faint smile: "But I estimate that if Han Wuxian devoured my Desire Grand Dao, he would become even more terrifying... his physique, said to be the primal origin passed down from the Nine Heavens Five Regions, is probably not far from that figure I once saw in an illusion..."

The Nine Heavens Five Regions cannot bind me, so they certainly cannot bind Han Wuxian either.

Although I don't know what the Sages of the Nine Heavens Five Regions intend, they are surely scheming against Han Wuxian, just as I discarded countless cultivation realms earned through bitter cold, all to seize a wisp of Han Wuxian's primal origin...

"Return to the Void... the fate of the Nine Heavens Five Regions is forged solely for Han Wuxian alone; I don't know if having taken a wisp of his primal origin will leave me any place to stand in the future." Yan Buji laughed loudly and shook his head.

Go then, to the true world!

(The book is complete)