The Eternal Heavenly Palace's purple-gold ram cleaved through the last murky layer of chaos mist within the Dark Gold Passage. Like a primordial ancestral dragon awakening from the ancient past, the enormous vessel sailed steadily and resolutely into a vast realm of wonders never seen before. This was the ultimate convergence of all causality and matter throughout the myriad worlds, and the final natural barrier on the path to the "Ultimate Source"-the Origin River.
The river held no water; what flowed through it were crystalline world membranes and fragments of epochs. Dressed in white, Chu Qing stood proudly atop the Heavenly Palace's dragon prow, his hands clasped behind his back and his profound gaze piercing the endless ages. Looking back, the Ninefold Transdimensional Logic Lockdown that had once barred his path, the Observer Civilization that had styled itself divine, and even the insufferably arrogant projection of the Creator had all become a few insignificant specks of dust within the Daluo Dao Fruit behind him.
"The so-called transdimensional laws, the so-called energy pasture-nothing but monstrous lies woven by corrupted ones to prolong their miserable existence." Chu Qing murmured to himself, his voice carrying the desolation and clarity of one who had seen through the falsehoods of countless ages. "I have torn every outer cage to shreds. The first stage of reckoning is complete. But that is not enough. The true cancer still lurks at the end of this river."
Tempered by the previous battle, the Daluo Dao Fruit within Chu Qing had already refined the "ultimate way of simplicity source." He no longer needed to deliberately oppose those intricate rules, for he himself had become the "utmost simplicity" that transcended them.
Just as the Eternal Heavenly Palace prepared to sail upstream and formally begin the second stage of its journey to