The Grand Founder was dead.
Chen Du told no one the details of that battle.
All anyone knew was that, late one night, an earthshaking boom had come from deep within the imperial palace, followed by silence.
Early the next morning, the emperor issued an edict of abdication, passing the throne to Crown Prince Su Yuanzhang. Declaring himself old and infirm, he moved to a separate palace that very day to recuperate.
On the day the crown prince ascended the throne, Chen Du stood in a corner of the Hall of Supreme Harmony and watched Su Yuanzhang take his seat on the dragon throne as the assembled officials paid their respects.
The new emperor found him in the crowd and gave a slight nod.
Chen Du nodded back but did not approach.
He needed neither the new emperor's gratitude nor any reward.
What he had come to do was done.
In the days that followed, he went to Fengyi Palace.
A few more white hairs had appeared at Consort Xian's temples, but she was in good spirits, directing the palace maids to water the newly planted peonies in the courtyard.
Chen Du shared a meal with his mother, and they chatted about inconsequential things.
She did not ask where he had been or what he had done these past days. She merely straightened his collar as she saw him out, just as she did whenever he left on a long journey.
Only this time, her hands lingered on his collar longer, as though she sensed something.
He also went to Qianchuan Hall.
Four years ago, when he had been placed under house arrest there, half the locust tree in the courtyard had just been struck off by lightning. Now, new branches had sprouted from the remaining half.
The bookshelves in the hall were just as they had been. He pulled out a copy of Flying Bird Step, leafed through it, and put it back. This was where his Martial Dao had begun, and where he had spent the most time in the Xuanye Realm.
With a new emperor on the throne, countless neglected matters at court awaited attention.
Prince Qi surrendered half his authority over grain transport in Jiangnan, and Prince Yan sent a memorial from the Northern Border pledging loyalty to the new ruler. The political situation gradually stabilized.
Chen Du watched coldly from the sidelines without intervening.
He had stayed here long enough.
Once everything was settled, Chen Du climbed alone to the long-abandoned observatory outside the capital's eastern gate.
He took one last look at the land where he had lived for seven years: the brightly lit capital, the silent mountains, and the river winding into the distance like a silver ribbon beneath the moonlight.
Then he closed his eyes.
Deep within his consciousness, the [Myriad Worlds Traversal] talent slowly activated, and a gate of light opened before him.
His true spirit returned to its rightful place!
When Chen Du's consciousness coalesced again, the first thing he felt was the pain of gravel digging into his back.
He opened his eyes. Above him were neither the dilapidated beams of Qianchuan Hall nor the bright sky over the East Sea, but the dense canopy of an ancient forest deep in the mountains.
The air was damp and cold, carrying the smell of earth and rotting leaves. A few low beastly roars sounded faintly in the distance.
Right, he was in the mountain forest.
Before traversing into the Xuanye Realm, he had been chased nearly to death by that mutated wild boar, only to be saved by the man carrying a saber.
Then he had found that crooked tree and triggered the world entrance, allowing his true spirit to descend into the seventh prince of the Great Sheng Dynasty.
He had spent a full seven years in the Xuanye Realm, cultivating all the way from a scholar prince under house arrest to the Transcendence Realm.
After killing Great Sheng Taizu, helping the new emperor ascend the throne, and settling matters for his mother and all his affairs, he had activated Myriad Worlds Traversal to return to Blue Star.
Seven years, yet less than a day had passed on Blue Star.
It was like a dream.
This time, however, Chen Du had also reaped enormous gains from his traversal.
His strength was now a thousand, ten thousand times greater than before.
A panel promptly appeared again:
[Name: Chen Du] [Realm: Third-Tier Evolver · Transcendence Realm in Martial Dao] [Current status: True spirit returned] [Talent 1: World's Spiritual Endowment Level: Lv1 (1/2) Ability 1: Infinite Awakening Lv1 (1/2) (expandable) [Talent 2: Myriad Worlds Traversal Level: Lv1 (1/2) Ability 1: Gate of Traversal Lv1 (1/2) (expandable) [Talent 3: Divine Revelation Reading Level: Lv3 (2/8) Ability 1: Martial Arts Creation Lv8 (3/248) (expandable)
Chen Du stared at the words "Third Tier" for a good while. They meant that Blue Star's evolution system in this age of Spiritual Qi Revival was divided into tiers.
And the panel had directly classified the highest realm he had reached in the Xuanye Realm as third tier.
This was an extremely valuable point of reference. At the very least, it gave him a preliminary measure of the strength and hierarchy of Blue Star's evolvers.
If he had fallen far behind in this age of Spiritual Qi Revival before, he had probably overtaken the others on the bend now. Even if he was not the strongest, he ought to be among those at the forefront.
Going from untiered to third tier in just one day was a speed no one could likely imagine.
Chen Du pushed himself up into a sitting position and looked down at himself. He was still wearing the clothes he had worn into the mountains. The edges of his canvas shoes were worn through, and skin had been scraped from his knee, the blood already dried into a dark brown scab.
He closed his eyes. Deep in his sea of consciousness were the thousands of martial arts texts from Qianchuan Hall, three ultimate arts at the Martial Arts Myth level, a Transcendence Martial Canon, and all his insights into the realms from First-Rate to Martial Arts Myth and beyond.
All of it was there, perfectly clear, not a single word blurred.
It was as though he had moved a library into his head. All he needed now was to train this body until it was worthy of those memories again.
Only, the cultivation system and the evolution system might be different.
In this age of Spiritual Qi Revival, the possibilities were far broader.
Chen Du looked around again. The crooked tree was still several dozen meters away, the charred lightning scar on its trunk faintly visible in the night.
The world entrance was still there, silent and still, like a door that would never close.
He walked over and pressed his hand against the rough bark. Something deep in his consciousness trembled slightly, as though responding to his touch.
But Chen Du might perhaps never return.
The cooldown for [Myriad Worlds Traversal] was five days!
In five days, he had to find another world entrance.
Dawn had yet to break, but a line of grayish white was appearing over the eastern ridge.
Chen Du used the thin morning light to get his bearings, his feet never stopping.
His spiritual power spread out, and the outline of every rock beneath every tree within several hundred meters, even the faint signs of life from insects lying dormant underground, registered clearly in his mind.
This level of perception was even sharper than it had been when he had first entered the Xiantian realm in the Xuanye Realm.
As he was pondering this, the bushes ahead suddenly shook violently, and a huge creature burst out.
It was another mutated wild boar, a size smaller than the one from yesterday, but its black bristles stood on end and its two little eyes glowed scarlet.
It had evidently caught some scent. As soon as it saw Chen Du, it lowered its head, aimed its two tusks at his chest, and pawed the ground with its hind hooves. It let out an ear-splitting roar, then charged.
The ground trembled slightly beneath its hooves, and the bushes in its path were knocked every which way.
To an ordinary person's naked eye, the charging boar was as fast as a thunderbolt, but beneath the reach of his spiritual power, every movement the beast made was broken down with perfect clarity.
He drew the small knife he had brought into the mountains from his waist. Its blade was no longer than his palm, and its edge was somewhat dull.
Then he turned sideways, stepped aside, and struck... all three movements flowed together in one breath.
The boar's tusks brushed past the front of his clothes, while his knife drove upward through the vulnerable spot between its left foreleg and chest, slipping between its ribs and piercing its heart with precision.
The mutated boar crashed to the ground. Its legs twitched a few times, then went still.
This was realm!
Though his body was weak, his speed slow, and his strength slight, before a Transcendence Realm fighter, every opening in the mutated boar's defenses stood out as clearly as if viewed through a magnifying glass.
A true master could kill even with a dull blade!
Chen Du pulled out the knife, wiped the blood from it on the boar's bristles, and slipped it back into his belt.
What he needed most now was to make up for his body's shortcomings as quickly as possible.
As long as he had enough spiritual energy to nourish it, cultivating from scratch back to the Peak Stage would not take long.
By the time Chen Du emerged from the mountain forest, it was broad daylight.
At the foot of the mountain, he flagged down a car going to the high-speed rail station. The driver was a chatterbox, going on all the way about the strange noises that had kept coming from the nearby mountains these past few days and urging him never to go into the mountains alone again.
Chen Du responded distractedly, his gaze fixed on the view outside the window.
A few black dots occasionally swept across the distant sky. They did not look like islands, or at least not like birds of normal size.
Soon, he arrived at the nearby high-speed rail station.
There were few people in the station, and train schedules scrolled across the electronic screens. Everything was as usual.
Chen Du bought a ticket for the earliest train back to the Magic City. While waiting, he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes to rest.
Outside the train window, fields and towns sped past.
Suddenly, Chen Du opened his eyes and turned to look out the window.
On the horizon, a black dot was growing visibly larger, flying in their direction.
It was a bird, but it was so enormous that everyone in the carriage fell silent at once.
Its outstretched wings blotted out the sky and sun, casting a shadow over the entire train. Its feathers gleamed with a cold metallic sheen in the sunlight.
Screams erupted throughout the carriage. The train began to slow, and the piercing shriek of brakes came from ahead.
Several trails of white smoke suddenly burst across the distant sky as military attack helicopters swept past at low altitude. Rockets trailed flames as they struck the bird's body, exploding into balls of fire.
Immediately afterward, several streaks of fire lit up the ground. Anti-aircraft missiles soared into the sky and struck with a thunderous boom.
When the flames cleared, the bird was completely unharmed, not even a single feather lost.
It lowered its head and pecked at the ground, and half a factory building in the suburbs collapsed.
Then, a flash of saber light appeared!
The light slashed upward from the ground, straight and sharp, too fast for the retina to catch.
It passed through the very center of the bird's body and extended all the way toward the horizon, as though someone had used an invisible blade to cleave the sky in two.
The giant bird, which had emerged unscathed from repeated rocket and missile bombardments, split neatly down the middle before that flash of saber light, like a sheet of thin paper.
The two halves of its body crashed to the ground, and the resulting blast made the train windows hum.
Chen Du leaned back in his seat, his gaze following the direction in which the saber light had vanished.
He reckoned that the man carrying a saber whom he had met in the mountains yesterday was, at most, a first-tier evolver.
But the person who had felled a bird hundreds of meters across with one slash today was certainly no weaker than a Xiantian master.
The Spiritual Qi Revival on Blue Star was not progressing at a steady pace. It was accelerating.
Every day, even every hour, new monsters would appear, and new powerhouses would rise.