The Eternal Heavenly Palace's purple-gold ramming prow crushed the shattered fragments of causality left by the First Heaven. Trailing ten thousand radiant streaks of Dao light, it sailed unhurriedly into the Second Heaven beyond the Transdimensional Gate. Ahead, the primordial chaos qi gradually became a vast, unnerving sea of dark blue. At its heart, an immense sundial-shaped disc hung above a rift in the void, blotting out heaven and earth. It was no ordinary artifact, but the High-Dimensional Clock, woven from pure transdimensional time particles.
As the Heavenly Palace drew near, the dimly glowing hand at the clock's center suddenly spun backward with frenzied speed, grinding with a sound that set teeth on edge. The rivers of time, which had flowed steadily all around, surged into reverse. In that instant, the very measure of space and time throughout the Second Heaven descended into utter madness.
"Arrogant mortal! Do you truly think that breaking the coordinate lock with a sliver of Simplified True Meaning lets you set foot in the transdimensional realm?"
From a dark-blue vortex of space-time, the enormous manifested form of the Second Heaven's enforcer, the Reverse-Time Venerable, rose. Halos of backward-flowing time wound around his entire form. His face shifted between youth and old age at an impossible pace, while his cold divine sense froze the void like chilled iron. "All things begin as specks and end in vastness. You labored for countless ages to build this mighty Heavenly Palace and forge your Dao foundation, yet before the supreme law of time, every bit of that accumulation is nothing but a plaything to be stripped away in reverse! All who enter this realm shall return to the womb or become lifeless stone!"
The Reverse-Time Venerable's hands flashed through a succession of seals. The High-Dimensional Clock erupted with endless,