“I’m back — I’ve finally come back…” Ye Fan’s divine sense surged like a great tide, roiling through the outer reaches of the cosmos.
Gazing from within space, the water-blue star looked magnificently beautiful — like a blue diamond, shimmering with crystalline light, almost dreamlike.
Ye Fan continued crossing, sacrificing one Profound Jade Platform after another, drawing ever closer. The consumption was enormous, but he had come well-prepared.
His homeland lay below. The water-blue star was not very large — far beyond comparison to the Northern Dipper star domain, let alone the life-source ancient stars of the Purple Micro star domain — yet it carried with it an indescribable and boundless vital energy.
Comparatively speaking, it was rather delicate. And yet it inspired awe — as though some great living emperor lay dormant within it, making one tremble involuntarily.
“How strange — why does it feel to me far larger than what I see, as though it surpasses even the Northern Dipper and Purple Micro in vastness?” Ye Fan paused, uncertain and unsettled.
He gazed at it from the outer domain, feeling that Earth was far more formidable than he had imagined — a sensation that chilled one to the bone. What exactly was on that blue star? He pondered in silence.
Upon returning, he sensed carefully. Earth was not what he had imagined — it seemed to contain something and some power that surpassed his understanding.
Suddenly, a planetary body swept through space not far from him. Ye Fan was startled at first, then relaxed — it was the Moon.
Upon its surface were crater after crater, so close together, and it looked entirely unlike the Moon as one viewed it from Earth.
“How strange — it seems as though there is something on it too, something that fills me with unease.” Ye Fan was puzzled. He pondered carefully for a moment, then descended.
Not long after, Ye Fan landed on the Moon. The temperature was very low. The rocks were cold and hard, as if they could crack a person open from the cold — this was the Moon’s night side.
Ye Fan was moved. He felt a trace of Supreme Yin sacred power, hidden within the cracks of the lunar rocks — but when he reached out carefully to grasp it, he found it so minuscule it was almost nothing.
The Moon — the quintessence of the Supreme Yin — ancient texts recorded as much. Could it really have something to do with cultivators? Ye Fan felt a growing sense of bewilderment.
He searched again and again. There truly was Supreme Yin sacred power — but only the faintest last threads of it remained, almost negligible.
“The Moon — called the Supreme Yin in ancient times. If you think deeply about it, the implications of this place are immense!” Ye Fan felt a chill sweep through his entire body.
He had not yet truly returned to Earth, and already here he had sensed certain mysteries — vanished histories, obliterated truths — and his mind was set wandering.
Ye Fan paid careful attention, using his hands to touch each rock, savoring the weight of the ages, sensing the Supreme Yin sacred power.
He had a strange feeling — that in ancient times, this place had once been the very source of the Supreme Yin, and that in some inexplicable moment in countless ages past, it had dissipated. He walked forward, hand reaching out to touch one cold, hard stone after another.
“Earth — you hold so many secrets!” Ye Fan murmured to himself. His thoughts turned to Jingwei filling the sea with stones, to Kuafu chasing the sun, to Hou Yi drawing his bow…
And these were surely only a small part of it — stories that survived in the folk traditions. The truly obliterated ancient secrets, the ones that had vanished without trace, were the foundation of it all.
Ye Fan placed his hand on a piece of rock, and heard a sharp, resonant sword-cry — as though from the clash of blades in a great ancient battle. The warrior’s spirit buried in his bones, the blood in his veins — all of it instantly surged to a boil.
There was a sword-mark on this rock!
Without any doubt, he could truly make it out. It bore the weight of history’s long passage within it, with an infinite killing energy enshrined in its depths.
“An ancient sword-mark from times long past…” Ye Fan murmured to himself. That had been an era when heroes emerged in numbers beyond counting. To have been able to witness it even once would have made any amount of cultivation worthwhile!
“I wonder if one could find the ruins of the Guanghan Palace anywhere on this Moon.”
Ye Fan wandered across the Moon with no fixed direction, following ancient traces, sensing the mystery that permeated it all.
Suddenly, a premonition stirred within him. He raised his head — something was rapidly approaching from the distance, sweeping overhead.
Ye Fan’s body radiated subtle light as he concealed his dharma body. A satellite passed overhead. He had no wish to knock it down, nor to flee because of it — he simply hid his true appearance.
At that same moment, at a famous satellite ground station on Earth, a group of people leapt to their feet, coffee spraying across their screens, eyes nearly bursting from their sockets in shock.
“God!”
The satellite swept overhead, and Ye Fan strolled with ease — walking on the Moon — sending a portion of the people back on Earth into a chorus of stunned cries, before falling utterly and completely silent.
“Dear God, what did I just see — is Satan taking a stroll, or has a god descended to Earth?” Such cries broke out in several locations, and were afterward classified as national secrets, triggering a panic across a small circle of people.
Ye Fan walked on, searching for ancient traces. But unfortunately, no matter how far he cast his powerful divine sense, he found nothing. The so-called Guanghan Palace was nowhere to be seen — it did not exist in this world.
There was nothing on the Moon — except for that one rock bearing the sword-mark. He had not found anything else connected to cultivators.
“Not being able to see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The trace remnants of Supreme Yin sacred power are proof enough of everything.”
Ye Fan let it rest, with no particular need to find a definitive answer. He crossed half of the Moon’s surface and arrived at the other side, where he found a stretch of metal shell.
It was a base built on the lunar surface. Over twenty years had passed — by current human technological standards, this was no longer a challenge. Had Mars not been so strange, a human space station would already have been established there too.
Ye Fan walked up close and observed carefully. The metal structure occupied a large area — there was even a patch of planted greenery within it, used for experimental purposes.
And as he was observing, the people inside the space station noticed him as well — nearly dropping to the ground in shock, eyes wide and jaws hanging, utterly stupefied.
But Ye Fan did not linger. In an instant he disappeared, shooting out from the Moon, crossing the void toward Earth — leaving behind only a single Profound Jade Platform in space.
The Moon was nearly 400,000 kilometers from Earth. Ye Fan crossed the void and, upon entering the dense atmosphere, revealed his true form, descending under his own power.
“Earth truly is strange!”
Ye Fan’s very first impression was an extraordinary feeling — followed by a deep and pervasive awe. He had sensed something entirely outside the ordinary.
The wind howled past his ears like knife-blades, cutting into his skin until it stung. Ye Fan descended steadily, looking out over everything below — mountains and rivers growing ever clearer.
The Great Dao of heaven and earth here was exceptionally unusual — vast and distant beyond measure, impossible for Ye Fan to grasp. This filled him with both astonishment and dread, a sense of ill foreboding rising in his heart.
Something incomparably terrifying must have occurred on Earth at some point in history. The entire world of heaven and earth’s Great Dao gave him a feeling of being incomplete — fractured.
Ye Fan fell through drifting white clouds, the scene below growing ever more distinct, revealing the magnificent sweep of mountains and rivers — but his heart grew heavier and heavier with each moment.
The vital energy of heaven and earth was so thin it was nearly nonexistent — practically zero. In such a state, cultivation was nearly impossible. He immediately understood why there were no more cultivators in the present day.
And yet this was not even the most frightening part. What truly troubled his heart most was that his own cultivation seemed to be rapidly declining — his divine power was severely fading — and he even had the illusion that he was about to “scatter his Dao.”
Why was this happening? This was something that would terrify any cultivator — and even Ye Fan felt his hair stand on end!
Should he even return to Earth, or would it turn him into a cripple? His heart shook violently.
“No — it’s not a problem with myself. It is the doing of heaven and earth.” After Ye Fan’s cultivation and divine power appeared to weaken, they finally leveled out and stabilized.
Fortunately he could still fly. Had it continued, he might have been reduced to free fall. For someone as proud as the sacred body of the human race, with one foot already across the threshold of the Way-Severing realm — if he died from falling like that, it would truly be the greatest farce.
“My cultivation and my level have not actually diminished — I am being suppressed by this heaven and earth. This is… the fabled End of the Dharma Age spoken of in ancient legends. The Dao itself cannot be perceived!”
In a fleeting glimpse, Ye Fan was shaken to the core. In the instant of being suppressed by heaven and earth, he saw towering great peaks rising into and beyond the clouds — their height unknowable, tens of thousands of zhang tall!
This was beyond all comprehension.
“How is this possible — Earth cannot have mountains like this…” Before he finished speaking, the vision disappeared. Below him were only some low hills and ranges. Everything he had seen had been a mirage.
This left him deeply unsettled and uncertain.
Ring!
Within his Bitterness Sea, two pieces of green copper trembled softly. Upon arriving on Earth, they had resonated in that very first moment — as though sensing something, as though foretelling something.
Ye Fan steadied himself, and observed from this patch of sky for a long while. The feeling from moments before did not return. He saw below him one towering skyscraper after another, row upon row, reaching up into the heavens.
He did not descend further. Instead he began crossing through the sky horizontally, already approaching the coastline. Not long after, he moved out over the ocean, and in this empty space, he could not help but let out a great roar, venting his emotions freely.
“I’m back!”
Boom!
Blazing with ten thousand feet of light, he dropped freely from the vault of heaven and plunged into the ocean, sending mountainous waves crashing outward in all directions toward the horizon.
On that day, the residents of a certain nation bordering this stretch of sea were thrown into panic, thinking an earthquake and tsunami had struck — and some even suspected the nuclear power plant disaster of over twenty years ago was repeating itself once more.
This was truly an End of the Dharma Age. Within this heaven and earth, Ye Fan’s cultivation had not actually diminished — but the power he could deploy had fallen by a substantial measure.
“No wonder… since the Qi refiners of the pre-Qin era, there have been no more cultivators in all the world. They all fled and departed. What on Earth happened here?”
Ye Fan’s heart overflowed with endless questions. Even if vital energy had dried up — that could be tolerated — but the Dao itself was imperceptible. How were cultivators supposed to survive in a world like this?
“The Qi refiners of the pre-Qin era, and those great ancient transmissions — I don’t know if any traces have been left behind. Perhaps there are still cave-dwellings and grottoes to be found.” Ye Fan murmured to himself, and at the thought, a fire kindled in his heart. So many places waiting for him to explore.
He walked across the surface of the ocean at extraordinary speed, gazing out over the boundless expanse of water. A thought stirred in him — could there perhaps be something like a Dragon Palace of the Eastern Sea?
But right now, nothing could compare to his mother and father. Everything else was secondary. He transformed into a streak of light and shot toward the city where he had once lived.
Over all these long years, he had cultivated diligently, with his parents on his mind at every moment. Through twists and turns, through near-death time and again, he had finally ascended the Five-Colored Altar. He had willingly left everything in the Northern Dipper behind — and now, he truly feared it had all been for nothing.
Ye Fan had been gone for over twenty years. Now he returned, gazing at one after another of the cities along the way — all of them grown unfamiliar — and his heart filled with unease.
Time flowed ever onward. He had finally come home. But would he still be able to see his mother and father? Would everything he had strived for come to nothing? In this moment, he was filled with an anxious, trembling fear beyond anything he had known.
In the human world, time is the most terrifying thing of all. It can erase everything. It can change everything. Even the great emperors of antiquity were powerless before it.