After the Eternal Heavenly Palace's Purple-Gold Battering Ram crushed the final barrier of the Dark Gold Passage, the deepest veil of All Heavens and myriad worlds was finally lifted. There was no earth-shaking explosion, only an ultimate stillness that seemed to span countless ages. The Heavenly Palace sailed steadily into a vast, wondrous realm without up or down, without directions, without light or shadow-the Karmic Origin River.
The river held no water. What flowed through it were crystalline world membranes and epochal laws that had yet to take shape. Chu Qing stood with his hands behind his back upon the Heavenly Palace's dragon prow, his profound Daluo Dharma Eye piercing the haze. He could clearly see the embryonic forms of countless universes, like pebbles upon a riverbed, swept along by karmic undercurrents toward an unknowable downstream. In their birth and destruction, the mysteries of creation unfolded in full.
"So that was it." As Chu Qing gazed at the magnificent river, understanding dawned within him. That so-called Creator was never the one who opened this river. He was merely an enormous leech entrenched near its source, forcibly damming some of its tributaries to build an energy pasture where living beings were kept like livestock. The true origin was this unclaimed ocean of the Great Dao.
The broadening of his understanding of the cosmos made Chu Qing's Daluo Dao Fruit ever clearer. Yet as the Heavenly Palace advanced against the karmic torrent toward the river's deepest reaches, the Origin River's instinctive defense mechanism was fully triggered.
Boom!
The river's flow suddenly twisted. Countless primordial karmic threads frantically intertwined before the Heavenly Palace, forming an "Origin Immune Entity" with no facial features and a glassy radiance suffusing its entire body. This was not a conscious living being, but an embodiment of order automatically